Episode 416: My boss wants me to build dark patterns and getting promoted without writing code

Soft Skills Engineering

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. “I’ve been assigned a ticket to “add more friction to the downgrade process” in order to decrease the amount of downgrades our app has.

   The proposed change has 4 modals pop up before the user can cancel their paid plan.

   I would like to push back on this change.

   Any tips on how to bring up the fact that this is potentially unethical / a dark pattern?”

2. I work for a mega corp software company as a senior engineer. My boss and I have been working on a promo for me to principal for the last year (I was passed on for the last cycle and so we are trying again in a cycle next year - aka still 8 months away). I previously was in the top 5 PR contributors in our org of 450 engineers, but we were reorged and I haven’t written a single line of code in 3 months. I enjoy doing architecture work and helping unblock teams with technical design solutions, but I’m not sure if not writing code is helping or hurting me. Is it just part of career growth that engineers at a certain level stop writing code and it’s a good sign for my seniority? Or is a big fat zero code contributions a red flag and I need to look for a role where I’m still shipping things myself?