Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:


Hey Dave and Jamison.

I don’t know what to do with the amount of the AI slop I have to review and I’m getting close to burnout.

I have a lot of context on my project, so my colleagues see me as a point of reference. Additionally, at a past job, I was a tech lead and could easily cover for TL if I wanted to (which I don’t) and I feel like the TL of my project and some of my teammates are taking advantage of this.

Every day I receive a lot of low quality documents to review. For example, our TL creates sloppy project planning documents and tickets and sends them to me for comments. Since they contain so many errors, sometimes including obvious security or data compatibility issues, or just text that is unrelated to the project, I end up basically rewriting everything.

The same thing happens with code reviews. Some code is obviously AI-generated slop with lots of duplication and errors, that in many cases misses acceptance criteria or has doc strings filled with buzzwords and adjectives. I usually add a lot of comments per PR and I know the author sends them directly to their LLM and then pastes back a verbose answer. As a result, I end up in endless conversation loops.

I’ve tried talking to my colleagues one-on-one, explaining how much work they are delegating to me. I’ve asked them to review their own work first and explained how exhausted I am, hoping they would show some compassion. But nothing has changed, because everyone seems to be in survival mode in this era of layoffs and I feel like they have become comfortable with me doing their work. I’ve also tried talking about this in retrospectives and tech team meetings, but the TL and tech directors did not support me because AI usage is encouraged. Instead, they said that they really appreciate my feedback because I have so much experience and thanked me for doing such excellent code reviews.

I also end up making most of the project’s tech decisions, I am the sole contributor to the project’s documentation and my vacation is mapped out in the roadmap as low delivery period. 😢

I like the project and I’m terrified to switch jobs in these times. But every day, it gets harder and harder to comment on obvious slop written without care without sounding rude or sarcastic. Sometimes I find myself still angry after work.

Is it too late to set the boundaries?

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.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:


Listener Jame ain’t no dance asks,!

Hey Space Therapists,
I am a consultant that helps big companies to fix all kind of stuff. It’s ridiculous how many different hats I wear. One day I’m the interim PM, the other day I am telling SAP devs how to use a coding agent, next day I gather stakeholder requirements for a customer self service portal. I do all of these tasks on a fairly shallow level and all of that work is happening without much coordination from my company. I think I do a good, but it’s hard gathering feedback on my work, since no colleagues are involved and I can’t simply ask the customer without revealing insecurity. Send sophisticated tips and don’t make me quit. Cheers!




Can I tell a coworker to stop using Claude?

I work on a small team at a midsized company, and a coworker keeps dropping overly verbose pull requests that are full of AI jargon. These are increasingly hard to understand, and then when I ask for design intent clarification I often get sent a long document that is even harder to understand!

And the code sucks! misleading docstrings, overly complicated functions, and weird places where the AI has convinced them that something needs to be backwards.

And often times I end up having to fix failing tests (that my coworker probably didn’t run), or report back later that their changes have degraded something in prod or is causing a lot of logging noise.

I worry that I’m doing the same thing and just not noticing. Code is starting to pile up in review and I don’t want to be rude and comment “ai slop” on 50% of the code! What can i do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:


Listener Myamax myamax says,

I just listened to episode 527 and could really use some advice on being good at interviews.

I was recently laid off with a decent severance package, so I have some breathing space. I’ve had several interviews, and I usually get past the initial screenings, but I don’t shine in technical rounds.

I’m a career switcher, and most of my tech career has been in analytics at a big company. I’m good at distilling things, very good at debugging and navigating mazes of corporate legacy, but I haven’t really built things from scratch. I’m not a pure individual contributor, not a product manager but some technical-product hybrid, and it was a fun place to be. I stole good ideas from different teams and stitched them together adding common sense on top. I spent a lot of time with users and stakeholders to understand their data and their processes. Most of the time they needed common sense and decent data foundations. Only in rare cases it came to fancy algorithms.

How can I sell myself better? Should I be looking for more product-oriented roles? Maybe spending my severance building tiny end-to-end systems to get better at take home assignments is a good idea?

I’d be grateful for any thoughts and your general interview advice for the software folk!




Hi, this is Mental Mario from Episode 395, where i was asking about being “the new hotshot in town”, as you put it. I took your advice, performed to the best of my abilities while trying to stump on my collegues work, and two years in think it worked out pretty well! I got my raises and will become the second in command after my boss. But wait- there is trouble in paradise!

With more money obviously comes more responsibilities, but i can’t shake the feeling that recently I’m doing the majority of the work in my team of five. From refinements to troubleshooting, from code reviews to releases, tasks just come hurling to me.

The team has a lot of confidence in me, but this leads to situations where they don’t challenge my ideas and approaches, which causes problems since obviously I make mistakes too- but I don’t have the teams safety net any more.

This dynamic feels unhealthy to me. Is this feeling justified, or is this just the way it is when moving up the corporate ladder? Given that I’ll be the senior of the team, do i need to delegate more task and supervise them, when I’m feeling overwhelmed with tasks?

Thank you so much for the show!

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:


Hi Jamison and Dave, jesters of my daily commute. I’m a *mechanical* engineer at a megacorp, and since people are people, I find most of your advice transfers pretty well.

I’m the tech lead within a small-ish org of about 25 people. We’re in-office, and split between two locations (in a similar time zone), and multiple different projects. This means that there are a lot of Zoom meetings between locations. Lately, I’ve been having an issue with engineers deciding to take these meetings from their desks in our open office plan rather than finding a phone or conference room. I find this practice to be maddening! It’s really distracting because there will often be background noise that makes it hard to clearly understand them, and it also means that my workplace is a cacophony of people yelling into their AirPods, competing to overcome the background noise of their colleagues’ yelling into their AirPods.

How do I make this stop and get my coworkers to hop into a phone or conference room for their meetings?! Oh btw, my manager is one of the worst offenders.




Listener bootersket says,

I have 3 years of experience, all at this same company and team. My team has one staff software engineer who really knows the codebase well. When I have questions about why such and such thing is the way it is, I ask him. I’ve noticed his answers are unhelpful. Often they are short, with very little detail. I can’t tell if thinks they’re sufficient, doesn’t know how to explain himself clearly, is mad at me, or if I am just don’t know enough to understand them.

For example, once I asked about two different variables that seemed ambiguously named and to refer to the same thing. His response was short and sweet. Quote: “almost the same thing”.

Am I the problem? Is he? When I get responses like that I don’t feel compelled to keep asking questions in different ways because it doesn’t feel like he cares about mentoring juniors with dumb questions like myself. What do I do?