Episode 347: New untrusting manager and crappy project management

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. 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 breaks me out of my flow. Recently they called an “Architecture meeting” and ended up talking about 2 spaces vs 4 spaces and other trivial stuff. I just felt like the facepalm emoji for the entire time of the call.

   They are technically good, but lack depth. For some reason they think know better than everyone else in the team. Unfortunately, they are my boss. How do I politely tell them, in a professional way, that they have to back down and trust the team? Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

2. Federico asks,

   Hi! I’m a junior engineer. Our project managers are really crappy. I keep getting wrongly managed and “exploding” projects, where in the last days everything goes wrong with the client. Should I take a project management course so I can organize better my projects and discuss with project managers how to prevent this? I don’t know how to make them work like they should.