About this episode
In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:
Mr A. N. Onymous says,
Hi Dave and Jamison,
Long time listened, second time caller! I wrote a little while back with a common new-manager question about how to handle one of my reports who was at the lower end performance wise, but at the top end on the pay scale. I’d been trying to manage it by getting raises for the rest of the team in order to balance things out a bit (and make the rest of the team happy). I did consider Limogeage but having them on the team was better than a vacancy.
Fast forward a year or so, and the problem resolved itself when this team member left - or so I thought. We’ve had a few months gap before opening recruitment again, and it turns out this team member wasn’t happy at their new role and has applied to come back. Given they negotiated well with us the first time I’m guessing they’ve had a healthy pay bump at their new role. What should I do?
On the one hand I know their performance, they do deliver well and I’m happy working with them and managing them. Would it be rude to offer them to come back at their previous salary (assuming they’re the “best” person when we interview)? Will they be offended if we don’t offer them the role?
We haven’t had interviews yet - so help me Dave and Jamison, you’re my only hope!
AI has taken over my team mate’s brain. HELP!
I work for a ~10ish or so team building a B2B finances related app for several platforms (mobile, web, backend, etc). On the Web team, there’s only two of us.
I’ve been on this team for around 4 years now, and during this times I’ve had several coworkers (the previous ones have either left the company voluntarily or involuntarily, moved to other teams, or completely left the field). I’m 100% convinced it’s not because of me, so let’s take that out of the question right away :-). All of this to say is that I tend to be the person that knows the most about our (quite large) codebase.
We work on a ten-year-old React application with some technical debt, but overall I think it’s pretty good.
My coworker comes from Android development. While he’s a great developer and has AMAZING soft skills (probably a listener of this podcast!, or maybe not because he has not quit yet?) he’s a little bit lacking on the general “Web Stuff (TM)” knowledge and many of the specifics details of our codebase.
A bigger problem is that he seems to have totally given up on learning web skills or understanding our codebase and is instead just tab-tab-tab-ing autocompleted AI crap all over the codebase.
His code works as expected, but when reviewing his PRs I feel like a slave of the AI. I’m not reviewing another human’s work, but just what some AI model is doing. While it works, it’s terrible code for another human to maintain. For example, there’s lots of “inline” cr
