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Jamison Dance
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Jamison Dance

Things Jamison Says on Podcasts

Works as a software engineer and has led engineering teams, drawing on that experience to answer listener questions about the people side of the job: career moves, negotiation, management, and how teams handle change. Co-hosts Soft Skills Engineering with Dave Smith, a weekly advice podcast for developers built around listener-submitted questions, with hundreds of episodes going back years.

Where to Find Them

Jamison Dance hosts and writes Soft Skills Engineering .

Recently: “Episode 535: Manager externalities and should I fight stupid processes” on Soft Skills Engineering (October 2026); “Episode 534: I'm so bad at my job and I've inherited a huge slop pile” on Soft Skills Engineering (October 2026); “Episode 533: I'm drowning in AI slop from lazy coworkers” on Soft Skills Engineering (October 2026); “Episode 533: I'm drowning in AI slop from lazy coworkers” on Soft Skills Engineering (October 2026); “Episode 532: My new company is an absolute mess and should I get an English-speaking job as a Japanese engineer?” on Soft Skills Engineering (September 2026); “Episode 532: My new company is an absolute mess and should I get an English-speaking job as a Japanese engineer?” on Soft Skills Engineering (September 2026).

What They Said

“This is the classic don't be a meat proxy problem. Don't make someone else talk to your AI through you.” — Jamison Dance, Soft Skills Engineering

The listener's question described leaving detailed review comments, knowing the author pastes them into a chatbot and pastes its answer back. The hosts paused mid-question to say how demoralizing that is.

Soft Skills Engineering · 2026-10-05 Permalink → Listen →
Soft Skills Engineering Around 11:31 into the episode
Jamison Dance

Filled with buzzwords and adjectives. I usually add a lot of comments to the PR, and I know the author sends them directly to their LLM and then pastes back a verbose answer. As a result, I end up in endless conversation loops.

Dave Smith

…with the question. Can we just pause there for a moment and just commiserate with how demoralizing it is knowing that you're writing real heartfelt commentary back and someone is just not even reading it and just pasting it into a machine and whatever the machine generates, pasting it back to you.

Jamison Dance

This is the classic don't be a meat proxy problem. Don't make someone else talk to your AI through you.

Dave Smith

I want to finish the rest of the The question, but first, I also want to say buzzwords and adjectives. I'm like, yes, that's how you describe AI output, buzzwords and adjectives. I'm like, why does that resonate so much with me when I hear that? I'm like, yeah, that's exactly the stuff that it…

Jamison Dance

Let me pick back up. I've tried talking to my colleagues one-on-one, explaining how much work they are delegating to me. I've asked them to review their own work first and explained how exhausted I am, hoping they would show some compassion. But nothing has changed because everyone seems to be in…

Dave Smith

Oh man, how many people listening to this right now are like, hey, that's me too.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“It also just feels bad to be surrounded by enemies that you have kind of invented.” — Jamison Dance, Soft Skills Engineering

A listener whose startup had just been acquired wrote in expecting corporate bureaucracy to sanitize the culture they had built. Dance recognizes the story acquired teams tell themselves — plucky rebels embedded in a horrible empire, about to be forced onto Microsoft Teams — and concedes that some of it will come true. Then he points out who pays for the story, which is the people telling it.

Soft Skills Engineering · 2026-08-31 Permalink → Listen →
Soft Skills Engineering Around 28:10 into the episode
Jamison Dance

Yeah. Yeah. My pessimistic expectation is that corporate bureaucracy will sanitize the culture I helped build. Yeah, it'll definitely change.

Dave Smith

…wins or get some friction reduction or get some new, you know, new learnings, new, I don't know, new ways of doing it. I don't know. It's just cool. There's a lot of cool opportunities. And I wouldn't necessarily go in thinking it's going to be all corporate bureaucratic nightmare material.

Jamison Dance

…and they're going to try and make us use Microsoft Teams and you puke and they're going to try and make us use these horrible like, I don't know, processes for deployment and you puke a little bit more. And yes, that is true. I don't know what the specific things will be, but there will be some things that they will try to make you do that you hate. It's nice to maintain some group identity. It also just feels bad to be surrounded by enemies that you have kind of invented. Like hopefully they like you and want you to be there if they bought you for a bunch of money. And yeah, there'll be some change and some friction around that. But I would encourage you to just be aware of that tendency and notice it when it happens and be wise about how much you emphasize it or not. There are some things that will probably be worth fighting to keep the same. You feel like this…

Dave Smith

Yeah. You know, I was part of a big acquisition once and it was kind of interesting because I got to learn a bunch of valuable lessons about. Mistakes I made. I was young in my 20s, and I actually, this is kind of crazy, but I worked for a remote office of a bigger company that was located in a…

Jamison Dance

Oh, yeah.

Dave Smith

You know, that the big company, big corporate people are just trying to ruin our lives all the time.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In

Hands-On Engineering Podcasts Software Engineering & Infra