In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. A listener named Mike says,

   To what degree do you think it’s appropriate to talk with your peer managers about people that have moved from their team to yours? How much weight do you give their criticisms of an IC that they used to manage that is working out just fine under your leadership? How do you know if it was mostly due to a conflict in their relationship, or if there’s a nugget of truth you need to look out for?

2. Hi, thanks for a great show. I’ve listened to 400 episodes in a year - thanks for making my commute fun!

   I’ve been at my current job as a software developer for a year. It’s a great company overall, but we rely on a 30-year-old in-house ticket system that also doubles as a time reporting tool. It lacks many basic features, and project managers often resort to SQL and Excel just to get an overview. As you can imagine, things get forgotten and lost easily. Everyone dislikes it, but the old-timers are used to it.

   They want any replacement to be cheap and also handle time reporting, which really limits our options. I suggested to keep using the old system for time reporting only for now, but the reaction made me feel like I’d suggested going back to pen and paper.

   While the company is old and set in its ways in some areas, it has made big changes in others, so I’m not ready to give up hope just yet. How can I at least nudge the company toward adopting a more modern ticket system to improve visibility and planning? I’ve shown examples that save time and offer better overviews, but it hasn’t made much impact. Where should I focus my efforts—or do I just have to learn to live with it?

   Some more context: This is in Europe and the culture at the company is generally open to feedback and discussions from anyone. I have 10+ years experience and a relatively good influence. My manager is driving change successfully to make the company more modern but I suspect he might have given up on this one.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Mr A. N. Onymous says,

   Hi Dave and Jamison,

   Long time listened, second time caller! I wrote a little while back with a common new-manager question about how to handle one of my reports who was at the lower end performance wise, but at the top end on the pay scale. I’d been trying to manage it by getting raises for the rest of the team in order to balance things out a bit (and make the rest of the team happy). I did consider Limogeage but having them on the team was better than a vacancy.

   Fast forward a year or so, and the problem resolved itself when this team member left - or so I thought. We’ve had a few months gap before opening recruitment again, and it turns out this team member wasn’t happy at their new role and has applied to come back. Given they negotiated well with us the first time I’m guessing they’ve had a healthy pay bump at their new role. What should I do?

   On the one hand I know their performance, they do deliver well and I’m happy working with them and managing them. Would it be rude to offer them to come back at their previous salary (assuming they’re the “best” person when we interview)? Will they be offended if we don’t offer them the role?

   We haven’t had interviews yet - so help me Dave and Jamison, you’re my only hope!

2. AI has taken over my team mate’s brain. HELP!

   I work for a ~10ish or so team building a B2B finances related app for several platforms (mobile, web, backend, etc). On the Web team, there’s only two of us.

   I’ve been on this team for around 4 years now, and during this times I’ve had several coworkers (the previous ones have either left the company voluntarily or involuntarily, moved to other teams, or completely left the field). I’m 100% convinced it’s not because of me, so let’s take that out of the question right away :-). All of this to say is that I tend to be the person that knows the most about our (quite large) codebase.

   We work on a ten-year-old React application with some technical debt, but overall I think it’s pretty good.

   My coworker comes from Android development. While he’s a great developer and has AMAZING soft skills (probably a listener of this podcast!, or maybe not because he has not quit yet?) he’s a little bit lacking on the general “Web Stuff (TM)” knowledge and many of the specifics details of our codebase.

   A bigger problem is that he seems to have totally given up on learning web skills or understanding our codebase and is instead just tab-tab-tab-ing autocompleted AI crap all over the codebase.

   His code works as expected, but when reviewing his PRs I feel like a slave of the AI. I’m not reviewing another human’s work, but just what some AI model is doing. While it works, it’s terrible code for another human to maintain. For example, there’s lots of “inline” crap that we already have utility functions or libraries for, regexes everywhere, custom CSS all over the place instead of using our design system, abuse of the CSS cascade instead of using our CSS-inJS solution, large files with lots of code repeating existing logic that’s already somewhere else, and code comments every 2 lines or so which provide no value, but that’s what AI does to explain things.

   I’m not against AI (I also have explicitly to say this to prevent it killing me in the future). I use it for explaining things to me, writing utility functions, suggesting improvements, or as a google search replacement that saves a lot of time.

   But leaving AI to do your work mindlessly while you sip orange juice and watch how it codes is wrong. We’re not there yet. These PRs work and are difficult to reject because management wants to ship fast. However, they are harming the codebase. We’ll get to the point where only AI will be able to touch it due to the amount of repetition, duplication and overall non-human friendly code.

   How do I tell this person “Please stop doing this and instead learn things properly, and use AI as a tool and stop you being the tool of the AI” without hurting any feelings, and without being seen as the AI grinch?

   Thanks for your help! Love the podcast, and why scroll keeps jumping up when writing on this form? Seems like AI is boycotting me.

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Albert Nonymous asks,

   I am the CTO at a small (5 engineers) tech start-up with non-technical founders. I was their first full-time employee and as such have been able to fully form this company the way I want. I’ve worked here for 9 years now and own 10% of the company. I enjoy the tech and the job itself. The pay is ok, not crazy Silicon Valley numbers but pretty good for a country with free health care.

   However, I started here while still in university. This is still the only job I’ve ever had. I am afraid that my resume will become less valuable the longer I stay here. I still keep up with current trends with hobby projects, but I’m worried that my resume will become less valuable if I ever need to look for another job.

   Also, I don’t believe this company will succeed in the long run. I am still the only person on the board who knows how our tech even works and I have found myself slacking off quite a bit during the last year since having my first child. In the meantime, I also feel like I can’t just quit this job since that will almost certainly spell the end for this company and all its employees (some of which I count among my friends after all these years). What do I do? Am I overthinking things? Can I just keep working here until it eventually goes under? Or do I absolutely need to bite the bullet and pull the Jamison and Dave Time-Honoured Special™ and quit my job before I become totally un-hirable?

2. For much of my 9 years as a software engineer, I wanted to be a leader. I just really enjoyed mentoring, training, improving workflows, working with stakeholders and co-ordinating on projects. Leadership seemed like a natural fit and so I was super psyched to be finally made a team leader last year.

   It has been hell.

   It has been like falling backwards out of a tree and hitting every branch on the way down, meanwhile it’s literally raining anvils and sabre toothed tigers. The constant pressure to have work lined up for the team and be able to report on the activities of the team at a moment’s notice is unbearable. I can’t stand being responsible for the delivery of other people’s work, writing up reports that no one reads or painstakingly de-noising pointless metrics. I dread having to pull eager young developers out of refactoring rabbit holes.

   Fortunately, as I took this ‘promotion’ with no raise, I’ve easily been able to get myself busted back down to IC. Happy days 😎

   The problem now is that I have no idea what to do with my career. My core experience is with dot net as a mid level engineer but honestly I’m what I would call a ‘hyphen’ shaped developer - I’ve seen and done a lot things but not to an expert level. Front end, back end, BI, and everything in between. That felt ok when I was aiming for leadership but now I feel lost. I honestly feel ready to go full goose farmer 🪿.

   What do I do next?