Social Engineering with James Lai

Agile, when properly implemented, can be an exceedingly powerful philosophy on software development. But gone wrong, it can often hinder and harm more than it helps. In this episode, I discuss common agile implementation failures and pitfalls across a wide spectrum of concerns, and discuss what implementations of agile I have personally enjoyed and found effective.

Most companies proclaim to "be Agile", but what does that even mean? Are they? Is that a good thing? And what are all these other terms we hear about, like Scrum and Kanban? Are we Agile because we have standups and use Jira? In this episode, we take some time to understand what Agile actually is (and is not) so we have a solid foundation for fixing our Agile processes.

This is a bonus Event Loop episode keeping you in the loop regarding current events. Amazon just announced they are laying off around 14,000 employees. Was it due to AI? Does this represent the beginning of the end for our field? And how should we all respond around the industry?

Burnout is unfortunately something that happens to a lot of us in our industry, and it can be an absolutely debilitating experience. In this episode, I review what burnout is, warning signs of approaching burnout, what makes our industry specifically susceptible to it, and most importantly, I review a large variety of tips and strategies you can implement today to prevent burnout.

We are often tempted to rewrite software - who doesn't like a new greenfield project? With all the promise of cleaner code, architecture, and fixing every problem in the past, they can be tempting to recommend. But here, there be dragons. Rewrites are often not the right answer and represent a unreasonable risk to yourself, your team, and your business.

We are notoriously bad at software estimation, yet we will be asked to do it hundreds if not thousands of times in our careers. Why are we so inaccurate? Can software estimation ever be accurate? Are we just doing something wrong?

As engineers, we are often faced with the question if we should build or buy a piece of software. In this episode, I attempt to provide a framework for thinking about and ultimately answering this question.

Engineering is fundamentally a social activity. This might sound completely counter intuitive, but it's an important reality for understanding the nature of our work. In this episode, for those whom are in the industry already, I describe various tips for some challenging social situations we often experience, and for those who are not in our industry yet, I explain just how social this field actually is.

Technical interviews have been broken for a while. In this episode, I discuss how and why our process is broken, how the industry got here, explore how other industries handle their interviews, and discuss what our interview process should look like, and how to get there.

AI is everywhere, but is it going to take our jobs as software engineers? Should we start looking for other careers? Is it safe to enter this industry if you're just entering college? We take a look at historical examples, compare this cycle with others in the past, attempt to understand what AI is good at and predict what likely will happen in the future.