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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

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1. \n

   I\u2019m in the process of quitting my job. I\u2019ve been a developer here for a few years and made amazing friends. I love the people here but I am looking for a new challenge and a pay increase.

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   I was discussing my references for the new role with my partner and she said I should ask my current manager. I stopped hard in my tracks and said \u201cabsolutely not.\u201d She works in healthcare and said she wouldn\u2019t get a job unless her old manager gave a good reference. I dismissed this as not applying to software engineering. But the thought has stayed with me.

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   Would use your current manager as a reference? Am I wrong to not do this? At what point do you tell your current manager your looking to leave?

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   My manager does not know anything yet and I thought it would be \u201cmean\u201d to tell him I\u2019m leaving and also ask for a reference. I do believe he would give a good reference though.

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   What are your thoughts?

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2. \n

   Hey guys,

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   Should I stay at a job where I get paid to do nothing?

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   I took a new job as a data scientist a few months ago and since COVID-19 blew up I have had absolutely nothing to do at my job. I\u2019m supposed to be working remotely but our team doesn\u2019t get a lot of business and we\u2019re mostly keeping a facade of being busy with \u201cinternal projects\u201d and \u201ctraining\u201d. This was nice for the first few weeks but at this point I\u2019m concerned about my career development.

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   Also, the job is more business-oriented than I expected while I would rather focus on building things. I would like my next job to be a machine learning engineer or a software developer role in some other domain. I\u2019m worried that my \u201chard\u201d engineering skills are deteriorating with every passing week.

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   All of this is made more difficult by the disturbed job market at the moment and the fact that if I stay at my role for another 7 months, I will receive a sizeable retention payment.

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   What should I do?

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   I love the podcast. Keep up the great work.

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