Podcasts · Soft Skills Engineering

Episode 534: I'm so bad at my job and I've inherited a huge slop pile

12 Oct 2026 · 35 min

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

•

Hi Soft Skills Engineering, I’m a senior software engineer with over 20 years of experience. I’m hoping you can help with with a problem where I’m dumb, weird and bad at my job!

There is a recurring problem where, despite all my experience and graybearding, despite my big words, I sometimes just miss very important details, and ways that are very consequential and cause time and feature gaps.

Sometimes I make a faulty assumption and gloss over initial errors, and later I get big errors that require big fixes. For example, sometimes I just miss random lines from a product spec or whole parts of the UI, like a blind spot, or like a Mandela situation where I could’ve sworn it was different where I read it. Sometimes, I read the docs on some library but didn’t really *read* the docs and missed the important line that I needed before things get broken.

It’s a soft skill, sorta, because it’s about how I go about my work, and I don’t know what I can do about it. It’s almost an intrinsic trait, isn’t it? But I’d love any idea about how I can improve or how I can adjust how I can work to compensate. Or possibly here how this is normal and it’s a process issue - but I don’t need excuses and am willing to improve.

Thanks for your great wisdom and advice!

•

So it has happened, a massive codebase written entirely by Claude via prompts from my non-technical PM.

And now I’m tasked with “make it work, integrate it into all these other services and tools we have. Thanks!”

How do I even begin approaching a massive codebase written entirely by AI with no actual software engineer validating/overlooking it at any point until it became this monster and now it’s my problem? I am also an L2 engineer that got prematurely promoted to L3 and now I just want to prove myself and work on a cool project (10000s of requests, many bottlenecks that need to be fixed, scaled, design docs put together… the whole shabang#)

Help. Urgent. 911. I want to cry.

Thank you, love the podcast!