Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 532: My new company is an absolute mess and should I get an English-speaking job as a Japanese engineer?

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison, I’ve been a Java backend dev for over 10 years. After getting laid off from a job I loved, I spent 3 tough months job hunting. I eventually landed a full-stack role at a non-tech company where I am the entire front-end department. The team is a mess: A CTO who hasn’t coded in years and calls me directly to assign tasks, all labeled “highest priority.” When I asked the CTO and CEO if we had QA, they literally laughed at me. Prod releases are “tested” by the CTO before telling me to push immediately. I’m at a crossroads: Stick it out for 6–12 months to gain AI experience, then quit? Try to move into management, and rebuild this mess into a functioning engineering organization. What should I do? Hey, Dave and Jamison. I’m a non-native Japanese speaker working in Tokyo with about 6 years of experience in backend(3 years in Tokyo) and haven’t used English in work. I started listening to this podcast for learning English. And I soon found this podcast is very funny and I found a lot of problems actually exist around the world, like AI hype, why people hate HR, low-performing team members, useless product managers, etc. For some reason, I want to leave Japan and find a job using English. I think the best approach is to find an English job in Tokyo first. And then transfer to an English-speaking country. I want to know as a non-native English-speaking engineer, what English level I need to get a senior engineer job using English. What would you consider if you were the manager who is interviewing a non-native English speaker? Thank you guys, I love this podcast, I can learn English, get some answers to the questions I’m confused about too, and laugh every week.

It takes more than leaving your laptop in clamshell mode over the weekend and coming to work on Monday with a $3,000 bill to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 532. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice podcast about all the non-technical stuff that goes into finding even more and exciting ways to run up unexpected bills. So you're saying they did not walk in the door with a $3,000 bill in their hand of like, I found this new, This new currency. Yeah.

Yeah. No. You know it, it's got your face on it. That's who they chose for the $3,000 bill. More like a $3,000 invoice. Ah. Less good. Yeah, you thought leaving a server on in AWS was bad.

Yeah, no. It's so much easier now. Well, don't do that. Yep. I guess the soft skills part of this is like how do you How do you tell your manager? Yeah, how do you tell your boss? Whoops.

Whoopsy-doodle. Well, good news. I made that part easy because the CTO found out before the engineer. That feels like the kind of mistake that helps your organization learn a lot. Oh, yes. And improve your systems. Yes, it does. And maybe right after this, I'll go and put a bunch of spend limits on a few things.

Ah, well, Dave, should I thank our wonderful patrons? Yes, please do. Thank you. Thank you to these people that change their Patreon name to something, sometimes their name, sometimes just wild phrases at the, and they do this by contributing at the level where we shot them at every single week and make us read their cool stuff. Thank you to, oh, I didn't look this one up.

Yeray Kualev, plan your next trip. with www. waila. Travel. Actually, I joined to fund Jameson's yacht. Oh, thank you. Nice.

Oh, Bukiris Tuscarawas, Pataskala, Kinnikinik, Hi, Piqua, Gnandanhoutin, Skioto,

Gwega, O. Nice. I think I've learned how to say these just from listening to you. Yeah, so, I'm becoming more cultured.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to say them, so what does that mean? Errors compound, I guess. Yeah, I'm becoming more like Dave, which is good. Will Wood what?

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confined to your name. It could be anything that I guess we feel appropriate saying. Yeah. It's our objective standard of how we feel about it, which so far we haven't had, this is not a challenge, but we haven't had to reject any of them. That's true. Yeah, you all have a good taste and judgment. Thank you. Dave, do. Dave, do. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, hi, David Jameson. I've been a Java backend dev for over 10 years. After getting laid off from a job I loved, I spent three tough months job hunting. I eventually landed a full-stack role at a non-tech company where I am the entire front-end department.

This team is a mess. It has a CTO who hasn't coded in years and calls me directly to assign tasks all labeled highest priority. When I asked the CTO and CEO if we had QA, they literally laughed at me. Prod releases are, quote, tested by the CTO before telling me to push immediately. And I'm at a crossroads. Number one, option one, stick it out for six to 12 months. to gain AI experience and then quit,

or number two, try to move into management and rebuild this mess into a functioning engineering organization. What should I do? Huh, that's not where I expected this question to go. Which one? Or should I just take over and fix it? Yeah, that's interesting. That's like the extreme ownership version?

Yeah, CTO's, yeah, I'll label highest priority. I mean, technically, if all of your tasks are assigned by the CTO and I'll have the same priority, I guess they're, yeah, they're all the highest priority. They're all the same priority. That's a fancy way of saying you get to choose. That's true. That your CTO has delegated the prioritization to you.

So you all, yeah, you're already in control. Congrats. Yeah. You told me they were all the highest priority. So I picked the one that felt out of the highest priorities the right one to do. The super highest. Yes. Highester priority.

There's a name. Okay. I mean, that's a superlative. That's the highest. Isn't there a name for the higher that thing, the second thing? Like a super superlative? Well, no, I mean, so high, higher, highest. Oh.

I guess high as an adjective. My daughter, who is in fifth grade, she'll probably tell me. Yeah, let's get her on the show. I feel like there's a name for that like grammatical concept of the second thing in the one, two, three list. But what I'm saying is we now need another name for the fourth thing. Yeah, yeah. A highester. Yes.

We'll call that a Dave. Tested by the CTO. Now, also your CTO is exercising extreme ownership. Yeah, I'm doing QA. I take ownership for the quality of this product. By telling you to ship it immediately. Yeah. Yeah.

Sounds like your CTO takes ownership for Get It Done Now. Get it shipped fast. Stick it out for six to 12 months to gain. Now, that's an interesting thing. I was just thinking in light of this question. You know, the last, let's say, 12 months of our industry have been probably the most change to people's day-to-day work that I've ever seen in the 20-plus years I've been doing software development. I imagine you feel the same. Yeah.

In fact, Jameson kind of turned me on to this, but it was last summer, actually, that I, Jameson said, there's this guy on my team who basically only uses AI to write code. and I was like, whoa? What is going on over there? And we had this person come to a workshop for us on what they were doing in their workflows, and that was my team's introduction to ClaudeCode and not just tab completion. And we've basically all pivoted to that now.

And I know on my team, and it feels like broadly, everyone is doing that. And I thought to myself, what if you missed it? What if you were laid off when this transition is happening? And it's kind of like you were in a coma and you wake up and it's like, oh, there's flying cold. cars now and we all live in space, you know, that seems like that's how big of a change it was.

Yeah. Stick it out. I mean, I don't see, I don't see anything particularly AI specific in the question. So I guess that AI experience is just be at a software job where I can use AI. Yeah, because I think there's a strong FOMO right now where if you're not actively working with AI at this moment, you are going to be considered valueless on the job market. And so, If you don't have a company that can give you a reason to use AI a lot and, let's not forget, pay for your subscription, then it might be really hard to catch up. Hmm. You know what else would make it hard to catch up? Moving into management to fix the whole org, that feels like I think AI can be very useful for people who are in management in that it lets them dip their toes into individual contributorness in a way they could not be for.

but if you're trying to learn how to be effective with AI, yeah, those do those do words, words are not coming. Those do feel like opposite directions. Yeah, I think so. I think this is a fork in the road moment. And I'm just thinking, don't tell your CTO about AI. Yeah, I mean, this sounds like the, I'm surprised there isn't another bullet point that says my CTO is just 100% vibe coding. Exactly. Every bit of our product. It feels like the type of thing. Yeah, where is that? It's like a, it's a, it's a glaring gap in this scenario where CTO hasn't coded in years but did use to code, assigns tasks to me all labeled highest priority. And I'm like, wow, why not just paste all of those tasks directly

into your agents and just go nuts? Yeah. CTO seems like someone who would love to do that. Missing some steps. I think that means you get to be the CTO now. I think so. You know the secrets. You can use AI and you can choose all the priorities too. Yeah, I'm the entire front end department. If you're a backend Java dev, I guess it depends on what this means by front end, because I've worked at places where front end means the web service that serves customer requests, not any pixels or UI or anything. But I'm assuming this is UI front end. I think so do.

I feel like, yeah, there are just so many variables here. Do you stick it out? If you're trying to rebuild the mess into a functioning engineering organization, do you have some ability to grow the team without doing that? Can you suck more people into front end or advocate for hiring? It's probably hard right now. Yeah, I mean, they just hired a back-end engineer to be the front-end department. Yeah.

I don't know if you're going to convince him you need more front-end engineers. If you move into management, now there's no front-end department, but then you get to say, and I've empowered you all, to learn how to build the front-end. Referring to who. Training wheels are coming off. I'm not going to do it for you. You're talking to agents now or what? No, I guess the backend team.

I mean, I guess more broadly, this dynamic shows. up of things are kind of a mess here. I could own the mess and then maybe fix it more or just get through the mess. And in my experience, it's always kind of a mess everywhere. But also if you, if it's a disaster mess, that's usually indicative of other problems. And you owning the mess will probably make your life worse. Even if you do make a difference. locally. It's, I don't know, this feels like a bummer now that I'm saying it. Don't try because you fail. No, I, I, yeah, the, this, this, the fact that this is the vibe that exists makes me feel like you will be more exposed to this vibe in management when more things are your problem and you'll

see more messes. The mess gets even messier. It doesn't make me feel like, well, everything else is fine. It's just these bullet points. Yeah. It sounds like this is not an organization that values a structured, high orderliness engineering culture. And so it might be even harder to change that culture than it is to adapt your own style to that culture. Here's what I would try. I would make my own plan for what I would do if I moved into management.

And maybe you don't even tell anybody, but if you're going to do this, I think you should be able to at least write down. Here are the outcomes that I would want, and here's how I think I would try to achieve them. And if you squinted that and think, and given what I know about the company, this seems impossible.

The outcomes are like, change my really, really, really, stubborn CTO's mind about this core belief they have. And that sounds harder. But it's possible doing that will give you some ideas that seem reasonable.

And then you get to bring that to, I guess, the CTO here? I don't know who you'd report to, but somebody and say, hey, I want to make this change. Here's what I think we should do.

here's why I think I'm the right person and how we will tell if it's working or not. And then if you do move into management, you at least have some mandate to try stuff that you think is the right stuff to do. Does that make sense? Yeah, it totally does. You don't want to say, I would just like to be in management, please. Right. And then they just kind of hand you everything and say, great, now another person I can tell. Go faster.

Yeah. I would like to be in management because I want to change all the way that you, do things. How does that sound? Am I hired? Did I get the job? Yeah. Things are a mess, but good news. I'm here. Saying it like that makes it seem like you're not going to get that job. Yeah. No, but I think the exercise of trying to clearly articulate what you would like to be true, how you would try to make that true, should help you feel like, does this feel possible? And then if so, yeah, if you get buy-in from somebody who says, yes, you can be the manager, then you get to find out where you are horribly wrong. Yeah. But at least you get to start from a place of shared understanding of what

you're trying to do. Yeah, I think that's good. And even if you don't take the plan to anyone else, you just write it yourself, you evaluate it. I think this is a useful exercise to determine whether option one, or what is it, option two, is actually a viable course of option for you. This is kind of like the famous stories of Abraham Lincoln writing letters to his generals during the Civil War. he was super mad. You know, and he wrote these really scathing critiques of their leadership and of their lack of performance. Then he never sent him.

And the reason we know he never sent them is because historians found them later unsent in his stuff. And I think it's like, I didn't know that. Yeah. I've heard that he's never sent him stuff. I guess I never put together like, how do we know that? Yeah, it's not like the generals got him and then returned him. Yeah. Mr. President, I'd like to give him.

this back to you in pristine form for your archives. Yeah, you wrote, do not read this, so I didn't. Anyway, so I love that exercise of really writing out a plan and figuring out if you actually could pull off what you want to do. In the meantime, I do think now is a very good time to have an engineering job. Like, this person already underwent three tough months of job hunting, and that is not fun. It is very challenging. And every month today that you're not, not working as an engineer is a month where you are not on this crazy treadmill that just seems to be going faster and faster, which means you might be falling behind in what's the latest skills. And unfortunately, unlike years ago, getting these skills actually costs a fair bit of money,

you know, with these silly AI subscriptions that we're all now dependent on to do our work. I have one other piece of advice, which is if you do bring this plan to somebody, it's really easy to be on a team and look around and say, I can't understand why other team is doing this thing in such a horrible wrong way. And sometimes the answer is, well, they just haven't thought about it. Sometimes there are constraints you are unaware of. It would be useful to ask whoever it is, I guess the CTO, are there things I'm missing? Like, are there outcomes that I'm missing that I'm not aware of here? Because maybe there are some important constraints that your plan doesn't account for that it'd be good to know ahead of time

and might explain some of the behavior. It might not, but it's sort of a walk a mile in their shoes type of moment where you get to understand. What are they worried about? And how can I make that less of a concern? Instead of just saying, I fixed it. Here's what's wrong. Here I fixed it.

Get a little feedback on. Are these all the right problems? Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Okay. Shall I read our next question?

Go for it. Okay. This is from a listener named Huang. I think I don't know how to pronounce that. Hey, Dave and Jameson. I'm a non-native Japanese speaker working in Tokyo with about six years of experience in back-end, three years in Tokyo, and haven't used English at work. I started listening to this podcast for learning English.

And I soon found this podcast is very funny and I found a lot of problems actually exist around the world. Like AI hype, white people hate HR, low-performing team members, useless product managers, etc. The shared culture of the human race. For some reason, I want to leave Japan and find a job using English. I think the best approach is to find an English job in Tokyo first and then transfer to an English-speaking country. I want to know as a non-native English-speaking engineer, what English level I need to get a senior engineer job using English. What would you consider if you were the manager who is interviewing a non-native English speaker?

Thank you, I love this podcast. I can learn English, get some answers to the questions I'm confused about and laugh every week. Well, thank you. Oh, wonderful. It's a great question. So my interpretation is they're also not a native Japanese speaker. Oh. I think.

You know what? I missed that. I read that as native Japanese speaker. I think you're right. Because I think that name isn't... Isn't Japanese. Isn't Japanese. Let me just do a quick...

Oh, Chinese. A Chinese surname. Yeah. Okay. I thought it was Chinese. Very interesting. Okay. Well, you've done it once.

I'm assuming that you learn Japanese, right? I'm assuming you don't speak like Mandarin or... Yeah. That would be odd. Yeah, you know what? I think, so when I originally read this question, I thought, this is a Japanese speaker who's learning English and wants to have an English speaking job. But I don't know. I think maybe this is a Chinese speaker living in Japan and Tokyo and wants to get an English speaking engineering job. And I'm like, wow, that, I mean, yeah, you've done it. You've done it once. You. Or I don't know, maybe, yeah, you must be doing Japanese at work. That sounds very challenging. In software development, what's really interesting about, software development, is that the shared language is English, or at least has been English, historically. You know, the most popular programming languages in the world all use English names. For the stuff that has a natural language name, like keywords, they're all in English.

You'd probably have to go down the list of programming languages and hit number 50 in popularity before you found one that use non-English keywords and reserve names and stuff. Maybe not 50, but somewhere around there, it'd be a lot. And so what's interesting is that most developers actually kind of have this shared English understanding that they've had to learn just to program. But I wonder if AI, generative AI, large language models, has changed this

to where now you can speak whatever language you want into the AI, and it will generate code in whatever language you want, regardless of what language you speak. That feels like yet another layer of trust to put on top of, Like we already struggle to understand the output. And if it does the thing we think and what it's actually doing, I feel like that would be even harder if you said, okay,

I've reviewed your plan in this language I understand. Great. Do it. I hope you're right. And now I'm going to review like the, I don't know, the compiled to English version, not just compiled from prose to this language that I,

that I understand. Right. Yeah, very interesting. Anyway, that was not exactly the question that was asked, but it's one that struck me as interesting, which is we've layered, like you said, a layer of abstraction that brings with a layer of trust required. Very, very interesting.

But anyway, to the question, which is, I want to get a job where I am an engineer, a senior engineer, using English. What level of English skill do I need? And that is a great question. And one that I have some experience with having worked for a large tech company where a big portion of my team members, I want to say 60 to 80%, probably, were working in English. well, 100% were working in English, and 60 to 80% of them at any given time did not have English as their first language. And so I quickly learned that perfect English language skills are not essential for being a great engineer working in an English-speaking team.

That's good, because I don't have them either. Congrats, Jameson. You can clear the bar. Oh, good. But I don't mean that to insult my team members at all. That's not at all what I mean. they were amazing engineers. And I say we're in the past 10th because I no longer work for the company where I had this great experience. Not that they all died.

The Great Reaping came through. Yeah, before the fire took them all. There was actually an English language test. Yeah. They all failed. There was a bad rebase and it killed my whole team. Before the AI robots killed them all. Yeah.

Anyway, what I found was that engineering. language lives in a domain where you don't have to be an expert, especially if you do high quality or if your team has a culture of writing. It helps so, so much with this. And of course, there were times when while speaking, we misunderstood each other. But when you write something down, it almost didn't matter what your skills were. And nowadays, with all the AI tools that can help you, it really, you have so much assistance to get clear communication in written form. So my advice was going to be if you want to get a job on an English-speaking team, find a team that already has a culture of hiring engineers for whom English is not their first language, and you will just

fit right in. I think that'll work really well. But if you go on one of these teams, it's like all Americans, they were born in America, the English is their first language, or whatever, I guess it doesn't have to be American. It can be any English-speaking country. I think you will struggle more because the level of understanding that's just the default expectation or the level of language skill as a default expectation might not be accommodating to someone whose skills are still developing. Yeah. I also worked at a megacorp where there were a lot of people in engineering where English wasn't their first language. And I feel like I had some like growing pains or culture shock or something of like, we're speaking English, but there's this new style of accent I'm not used to. And it took

me a few months probably to feel like I was understanding as well as everybody else. But people who were already there, it was fine. So I definitely agree that you want to be at a place where people are used to dealing with, like, I don't know, just hodgepodge of accents of different origins and where you learned English from. And like that, that makes it easier to be used to communicating. And I think the bar is lowered just because everyone understands, yep, we're trying to work through this other medium. Yeah, and when you said the bar, you mean like the language skill bar. Yeah, yeah, right.

Like if you work with a team of only native English speakers, then they might be distracted more by, I don't know, some incorrect idiom or, you know, they're just, and it's not that you're not intelligent or that they're not intelligent. It's just you don't want to stick out as much and you would stick out less in a team of more people speaking English as their second language or another language. There's some great news to this advice too, which is that it turns out the highest paying engineering jobs, the teams that those jobs are on look just like this, I think. And that's because the highest paying jobs tend to have a global audience and they source from all around the world. So whether it's one of the fang companies, I don't know if we're still using the word fang anymore. I actually saw a hilarious meme where they took the new list of top tech companies and it was like OpenAI, Netflix, something else. And it's spelled out. only fans. Okay. The only fans. You know, of course. Anyway, it was hilarious.

Anyway, that set of companies tend to be the highest paying and also tend to have the highest proportion of engineers working for them who English is not their native language, which is awesome for you. This almost feels like the same question as, how do I get my first job in software? You know, like, how do I get my first job in English-speaking software? Someone has to, you have to practice and demonstrate some skills and learn some skills on your own. And then someone still has to kind of like take a chance on you in a way, you know? Yep.

So I think some of this probably overlaps with just general learning English advice. And I have learned exactly one foreign language and mostly forgotten it now. But I think learned it pretty quickly and pretty well in general. And I've also seen a lot of people fail to learn a foreign language. And the best thing I've seen is you just have to speak it really. poorly a lot. The more words you say in English with someone else listening and giving you feedback and a real person, so you're trying to communicate and like struggling and get, I don't know, maybe you don't get embarrassed. I remember I did. You're feeling stupid that you know what you

try, you're trying to express and can't. Like, yeah, that's just the only way I've seen work for becoming fluent in the language. It doesn't, if you read it fluently, if you watch a lot of TV shows, you can you can get better at understanding it, but you also have to communicate and that only comes from saying the words and saying them mostly wrong. And listening to the words a lot. And I think, you know, listening to podcasts like this, it's helpful, but it's probably just like step one. And I think a higher level, like the next level that you will need to do is you will need to have verbal listening and comprehension skills that are good enough to get through a technical interview. If you end up misunderstanding a question that an interviewer asks and answering the wrong question, it's kind of a glaring indictment on your English language.

skills, and it will cause you to suffer in the interview process for sure, especially nowadays where there seems to be more supply of candidates for jobs than jobs. And so you'll want to, I would probably, honestly, I would probably like pay one of these mock interview places to do an English language interview for you. But the cool thing is a lot of the people doing those mock interviews themselves might not be native English speakers, which I think would be really helpful. That might actually be easier to understand, at least that's what I found. So like James and I also learned to speak a second language, and what I found was that I could. I could understand the Americans speaking my new language badly, much better than I could understand

the native speakers speaking it well. And I think... Buenos die. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm like, oh, I know exactly what this gringo is saying. Anyway, it was really, really interesting. In fact, I could even understand related languages being spoken poorly by Americans. You know, like, anyway, I learned Spanish. Jameson spoke Portuguese, but I'm sure if you, if Jameson, if you broke out in Portuguese right now, I could probably understand it. It's gotten really bad. So that helps you understand it. It does. You would do better. That's right. Whereas if a, you know, if someone came here straight from Brazil, grew up in Brazil and started speaking to me, I'd be like completely unable to understand

them. Anyway, so practice listening to those. I would say study the vocabulary in the engineering world really well. Like there's a bunch of words you need to know very clearly, you know, words like cash and distributed system and Q and just all these words that might be kind of weird for anyone outside the engineering field and you're just not going to get these from like duolingo or YouTube videos you're not even going to hear them on this podcast right but you need to get those those words verbally into your mind so you can quickly recognize them during an interview I wonder how many of those are already kind of loner words into other languages if you're doing engineering I like I imagine database yeah I feel like I feel like I've heard people say database if they're speaking a different language

They just say like kind of the English word in the middle of their language. So something that you might have a head start on. Yeah, for sure. Like the word get, for example. Like there's no Japanese get. You're not going to translate that. Yeah. There's a lot of that like get, grep, you know, many, many words like that where you have a head start, which is great.

This is cool. I do think the fact that you, if we're correct, you've already learned Japanese. I guess I've heard that Japanese is a pretty difficult language to learn. And I know it's not at all related to English in, in kind of. kind of language, I don't know, family tree. But if you can do that, I think that shows you got what it takes. Yeah, I think you do too. Also, it's easier, I think, to learn like your third language than your second language, because some of the skills are very transferable of just realizing that you don't just translate words one-to-one, like grammar is different.

All those bad assumptions that everyone has before they learn their second language, you don't have them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I do like the idea of getting an English-speaking job in your city right now in Tokyo because you can work with other. engineers who are guaranteed, are almost guaranteed to be also learning English in the engineering world. Some, of course, will be learning more than others. But they are all, you know, if you can find a job where it's like, it's an English speaking company and you've got a team in Japan that's working, maybe it's a distributed team where you've got other team members and other parts of the world and you've chosen to use English as your shared language for the team, that could be a really

great incubation place to develop your English language skills. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck. Good luck. Yeah. This is exciting. I think you can do it. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to Soft Skills. Audio and click the Ask a Question button where you can fill out our form. And you can fill it out in any language you like. But yeah, we will only understand it if it's in English.

But we know how to paste it into AI. Yeah, I think translations. I guess we didn't even talk about that. Maybe you get one of those earpieces that just live translate stuff. Oh, yeah. I've heard the new AirPods do that even. Well, maybe that's your answer. Maybe that's salt.

Yeah, maybe we don't even need it. The babblefish is here. Yeah, yeah, it is bizarre. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next week.