Jamison Dance And Dave Smith Podcasts

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Dave and Jamison! What do you do when one of your immediate teammates is constantly competing against you? I really don’t like competition. Ignoring the competitiveness + praising his value did not work. Some examples: Leaving code reviews comments showing off obvious knowledge which does…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: During our next team meeting I jokingly gave a status report on the state of my desk and referenced the note. I believe this was the first time someone had publicly acknowledged the note writer, and it invoked a very passionate response from my teammates expressing their own annoyances with …

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener Steve asks, How long is too long to wait to be paid? I’ve worked for 4 early stage startups in my career. Two were successful. One failed. My current one is “limping along” but showing signs of taking off. At the startup that failed, we stopped getting paid and some of us stuck ar…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently started listening to your podcast from the very start of the show! One of the largest differences I noticed (aside from the audio quality, lol), is how often you used filler words like “um”. How on earth did you manage to stop using them? In work presentations and demos, I often e…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My architect is too busy with his kids! His kids have had a lot of school and medical issues over the last few months and he’s ended up flexing a lot to take care of them. This causes meetings to get rescheduled or scheduled far out in the future, which is contributing to timeline delays on …

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a startup that makes embedded devices and the software that runs on them. Everyone on the tech team does both. We recently hired someone to lead the tech team to give the CTO more time for other duties. My new boss is incredibly experienced with hardware design and embedded systems…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a startup with a distributed team. Recently one of our clients experienced a production outage. As a small startup, we do not have an on-call rotation, and teams usually resolve issues during business hours. However, during this particular incident, most of my colleagues were on a…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My manager finally exploded. They screamed and insulted our whole team because one teammate had a 4 day delay on a 2 week task. Our manager Theo (fake name) was recently promoted and now on top of managing our team of 7 engineers, they also manage 2 other managers with 6 engineers each. I ha…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m not a software engineer, so you can stop reading here if you like ;-). I listen to this show every week as the soft skills you discuss are just as applicable to my role as an electronics engineer. I have 5 years of experience and in my opinion, the right level of competency to step in to…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi, have you ever been through a technical interview and bombed a question? I did, and it feels awful, especially when the question was easy but I couldn’t focus due to time pressure and stress. Do you have any tips for dealing with interview anxiety, and get rid of the bitter feeling if the…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I am a senior engineer looking to make staff. Every week at my one on one I ask my manager what I can do to improve and always receive the answer “keep doing what you are doing”, but when I receive my performance review, I don’t receive top grade or promotion and there are listed areas of im…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey Dave and Jamison, long time listener of the show. looking to get your advice on dealing with guilt at work. Lately, I’ve found myself in a lot of situations of having to deal with bugs/incompleteness after pushing out a feature. It’s not my intention to be careless and I do feel like I’m…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Our small team where I work as a senior software engineer has a new engineering manager. They don’t trust me at all and verify simple technical things like how git rebase works, in the middle of meeting calls. I feel micro managed. Calling me on slack (slack huddle) without prior notice brea…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently applied for a job for a great company. The interview went well until we talked compensation. I said I expected to get a pay raise for changing jobs, but it seems that they can only offer me as much as I already have. I have never negotiated salary before. With my current job (whic…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have around 14 years of experience and was recently promoted to a Head of Engineering role. I am now leading an engineering department of around 75 people. I’ve become increasingly ‘hands off’ with coding, and it’s been at least 2-3 years since I wrote code regularly. My role is completely…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m a senior front end engineer at a medium sized tech company. During the good times of limitless tech growth, a common way for engineers to grow our “impact” (an important criteria at many companies for promotion) was to find ways to lead/manage more people, whether this was becoming a man…

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: A listener named Mike asks, I’ve been offered an Engineering Management position at a company I previously worked for. The team is very small and composed of juniors and mid-level developers. The role is also completely new and because of the size and experience of the team there is some exp…