Episode 477: Four months and I already hate my job and grumpy and fuzzy

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hey guys,

   I have been working for four months at my job and I already don’t like it.

   This is my first job out of college and I work as a C# backend engineer for a small B2B SaaS company. I really think this company is a dead end. There is a lot of technical debt and antipatterns and we have no automated testing whatsoever. Most of our time is spent manually debugging but no one wants to refactor.

   I’m already thinking about working somewhere else. However, it took me a while to get this job, and I don’t think the market has gotten any better since. I’m trying to decide whether I should focus on applying to jobs again or if I should work on a bunch of side projects and open source to stand out better. On one hand, I can learn new technologies on my own to make me stand out for my next job, but on the other hand, I feel like as long as I stay at this company I am wasting time, since I’m not learning from my job. I want to switch to more distributed backend engineering in Java anyways, but I’m not sure how to go about it.

2. Listener Ghani asks,

   “I’m a mid-level software engineer who has trouble communicating with my engineering manager and product manager when there is unclear or missing information about an assignment/story/project.

   They answer with hostile/dismissive tone/non-answer (e.g it’s on the jira-card, epic, etc). They course correct when they have the information later, harshly

   my impressions were

   • they don’t have the information at the time
   • they expect engineers to make decision
   • they expect engineers to know something they don’t (e.g architecture, infrastructure, past decision, plans, etc)

   I really want to look for where we can have a safe exchange of information. How can I do this?