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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Questions

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   I have been working at a large tech company for two years now, after I graduated college. My job title is \\u201c\\u201cSoftware Engineer\\u201d\\u201d, but I have barely written any code on my job in the past two years. I\\u2019m on a product team that doesn\\u2019t own any infrastructure, and when the product managers want us to build something, we find out which teams in the company own the infrastructure and stitch a product together. We often get push backs because usually the infrastructure we need to build a product belong to some entirely different team who do not have stakes in the product we\\u2019re building.

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   I am worried that my coding skills are deteriorating, since most of my time at work are not spent on coding. For example, meetings where people hash out how to do something in a system none of us are familiar with, chasing down people in other teams to ask them to squeeze out time from their busy schedule to help my team, and completing process paperwork. On the rare occasions when I do make code changes, it\\u2019s been copy-and-pasting another section of the code/config and changing a few parameters.

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   It seems to me that success on this job depends mostly on knowledge of the different internal systems, as well as the social capital of knowing people on different teams. Is this normal? Is this what software engineering is about?

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   Hi there! Love the show and your fun but useful answers.

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   I have a career question and would love to hear what you think.

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   I\\u2019ve been an Engineer for several years now and was recently asked if I\\u2019d like to move into Product Management. At first this sounded great. I\\u2019d get to set the direction of the product, get involved with strategic planning and roadmap meetings, and generally have more input into my squads work.

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   The thing is \\u2026 that isn\\u2019t what it is at all. Most of the time I am fielding requests from marketing and sales people for sales collateral, sitting on customer calls, and digging through dashboards to find enough \\u2018evidence\\u2019 to prove why we should prioritize the backlog the way I have in mind, and I have even become the \\u2018bad guy\\u2019 when the squads ideas don\\u2019t line up with the Product team.

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   Have I made a terrible mistake? Is Product Management really a good move for Engineers?

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