Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 12: Making friends at work and how to be good at being managed

Episode Date: May 23, 2016

In episode 12, Jamison, Dave, and special guest Ann Harter answer these questions: How do I make friends at work? Should I? I hear a lot about being a good manager but not much about being managed. How do I do that?

Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode 12 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I am Jameson Dance. And I'm Dave Smith. And today we have a special guest. Do you want to introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Anne Harder. I yell a lot on Twitter, and I am a software developer in DevOps at SurveyMonkey. But before this, I was a research psychologist.

I studied personality, motivation, and aesthetics. That is so cool. I did a lot of yelling while I was in graduate school, too. Also on Twitter, so it's not new to tech. So you didn't start yelling with tech. You just brought yelling to the industry. Yes. No, I was really, it seemed like there wasn't nearly enough yelling on Twitter about technology.

So I decided to, you know, raise the discussion to a higher volume. A higher level of caps lock. oh my gosh that was so good oh cool i love it well dave uh i think you have a joke for us if i'm interpreting this i don't think we need one anymore i've already giggled all my giggles okay good you got your giggles out do you want to read our first question then yes sure okay so the first question is how do i make friends at work or should i even make friends at work what a great question yeah i i learned everything i need to know about this question from watching reality TV shows,

which is I'm not here to make friends. That's what they, every show. I'm here to make allegiances and then crush them when I no longer need them. Yeah, it just reminds me of Survivor. Oh my God, that sounds so stressful. How would you ever get anything done? People would be sabotaging your tickets left and right.

But yeah, but you're the best at sabotaging their tickets. So you come out ahead. I just marked Dave's Jira ticket finished when it wasn't. it's gonna be awesome well that sounds great um so yes sorry i do have things to say about making friends at work i think that i think categorically that you should do it um i think that we spend uh i think we spend 40 hours a week in our jobs um and at least and frequently for people in technology, we spend more than 40 hours a week at work. And there is really no reason to draw a hard line between, you know, work friends and real friends. I think that friends

are friends. And you can have varying degrees of closeness and shared activities and shared interests with various friends in your life. But I think that work friends are actual friends. What if what if I only interact with this person at work? Are they still my friend? Like I don't ever do anything with them outside of work yeah i think so i think i mean you know i have friends that i only ever do uh i'm trying to think of like non-work friends that i have like that i only do one activity with you know but i think like i have a friend that like i knit with this is all we ever do is she not my real friend because all we know she's just she's just a knitting friend she's my knitting although you know like sometimes though like then when i

describe when i describe people to other friends then then that person does become something like well, you know, my knitting friend. Um, but I think that, I think that work is an excellent place to, uh, to make friends. I think, you know, they say that like something, something like people complain because once they get past 30, it becomes really difficult to make friends. And, and that seems a little weird because, uh, here we are in, in, in a building all day surrounded by people in the the um who could potentially be your friends the um uh the ingredients for friendship are basically like three things this is what's this is what uh social psychologists have found the first thing you need is proximity right you can't be friends with somebody that

you're never around um and then uh repeated unplanned interactions i think was is what it's called so um you know this is this is this this is the time when you sit down at lunch with co-worker and you wind up talking and you realize that you're both into i don't know extreme sports knitting yeah extreme knitting extreme sports and uh um and then you know the third one becomes a little bit more difficult and i think that maybe that's where people like draw this line because work the third one is something like uh you have to have like a like a casual environment where you can let your guard down and just sort of allow these unplanned interactions to take place. I think that tech companies in particular say what you want about, you know, the people

get very, say a lot of, you know, derisive things about like, you know, the foosball tables and all that. But I think that these are, especially if you're going to be at work, right, 50, 60 hours a week you should be able to have this downtime and this ability to socialize with your your colleagues so that like you actually really can build these friendships sorry that's really cool that was my speech about i'm no i'm so glad there's a formula for making friends now i can actually do it yeah no there totally is there's a simple pre-set process you know and that kind of thing was like really easy for a lot of people in college right you throw uh you know several thousand you know 18 year olds into a dorm room or a dorm dorm dormitory dorm building and um we

don't put all several thousand of them in one dorm room in the dystopian future we will um uh it would probably cut a lot of costs what if we just put them all in pods like they don't even need to go to classes you have vr do you know when you say when you say that though that makes me think of the matrix when they're in those little those little like yeah in the real the real world when they're in those yeah yeah i mean we could yeah that's that's my management philosophy is do what the robots did in the matrix so can i tell you a story about me making a friend at work yes please um and my last job almost 10 years ago we had uh we sat two to an office with a door and so every office had two developers in it and my office mate left the company and so i was

mateless for a week or so and um one of the other engineers in the office did something that i thought was really cool he came to my office knocked on my door and said hey i'd like to be your office mate can we do that and i was like okay like i don't know like sure and i was like why do you want to do that like why would anyone ever want to be sharing an office with me and manager didn't tell them to do it and he's like no i just thought it'd be i thought you're really cool and it'd be cool to get to know you a little better and i was like wow oh anyway that was like 10 years ago and that has blossomed into a long uh valuable friendship to me over a lot of years and um it's been awesome and i was just so glad that he was willing to say yes i'm at work and

yes there's like a professional standard of behavior and certain lines and and you know these various boxes you have to put yourself in but i'm just going to go and put myself out there and and see what happens and it was so cool that's i i love that i love that this happened to you i i think it was my first and last friend oh no also my psychologist tells me that he's imaginary but i don't know he um no i really like that i really like that this happened i think that it becomes increasingly difficult as i said you know you get over 30 and then suddenly you just sort of look around and there's all these adults around you and you become very afraid of making these first um these first

taking this this initial this this initiative to uh to to have a good to to build a relationship with them whereas like little kids are great they walk up to each other and they're like you want to be my friend and like they've literally just met and they're like yes we're friends and then they're friends forever and or maybe at least as long as that time in the sandbox lasts yeah exactly until it's time to leave the park right and until mom until mom says that it's time to go and then that's the end of that and i think that um but they don't care they don't care right that it's time limited like they're just like i just want a friend let's do this and maybe we shouldn't maybe we shouldn't either maybe part of our concern with um with having quote-unquote work

friends is that like obviously none of us are tied to our companies and there's this fear that if you make friends at work you will wind up you know like abandoned um when they leave and you'll wonder to yourself like was that really a real friendship if if this person uh you know left me if i never talked to them again were we really friends like maybe you'll feel bad if you don't maintain the relationship after parting ways at work well i mean like so i suppose that i suppose that could happen you could but i think that some some relationships are time limited like the kids in the sandbox right mom says it's time to go home for lunch so you're you know you're out um and maybe you never see that kid in the park again um but i think that that the same can be true of

adult relationships and i don't think that that makes those relationships any less valid or any less real um than than the kids in the sandbox i think that you know sometimes people move on from their jobs and maybe you never maybe you literally never see that person again maybe you only see them like at weird you know kind of events you catch up once or twice a year but i think that that doesn't that doesn't in any way invalidate the the relationship you know sometimes people come in and out of your life this is the thing that you know becomes apparent as you get older not everyone is around forever and ever and sometimes that's okay now i i'm 29 so what i'm taking from this is i have a year to just go crazy and like make all

the friends i can yeah pretty much you're done and then that's it you're just gonna hit a cliff and it's just going to become extremely difficult from here on out sorry pal okay well it's good to know that i can i can use the time i have left um i want to give you some hope jameson i'm 37 and uh i didn't have any friends before or after 30 so you didn't hit a cliff is what you're saying i'm just kidding it's great one friend um so so one potential downside that that came up is what if your responsibilities change what if you make friends and then the friend becomes your boss or you become your friend's boss and then you have different methods of interaction you have responsibility over this person or they have responsibility over you it's not just

pals that kind of chat and hang out at work and after work how do you how do you deal with that um i think that's a i think that's a worthy concern i think it's it's always worth considering uh uh you know the worst possible outcome and then usually immediately discarding it um i think that i think that it's entirely possible right that one of you gets promoted or you know you you join a company where your friend already works and is your manager something like that um but i think that there's a risk of bad things happening in any relationship and um regardless of of of what it looks like so that's not a reason not to make friends like oh no one day one of us might get promoted and it might get kind of weird is not a reason to not to not get

drinks after work you know what i mean like uh you know sure yeah it's that's not a reason to to not go to lunch together and to like, just sit there and shoot the shit. Oops. Sorry. Sorry. There's no, I'll,

I'll beep it. Don't worry. There's a, there's like a specific Dave assassination position open and your friend gets promoted to it. And then now, now you regret all those good times you had together. I revealed so much about my personal life.

He knows the route back to my house. Oh no. What a good, what a, what a good way to go though. yeah that's true wouldn't yeah wouldn't you want your friend to do it i don't want to be killed by a stranger yeah let it be extra terrifying and feel like super like a lot of betrayal but it wouldn't be betrayal because really the person is serving the interests of the company at that point

and there's it's not it's not it's not personal it's business yeah wasn't that a supreme court ruling like you can murder people if it's if it's in the interest of the company yeah something like I mean, like, my understanding now is that corporations are people, but we are, they're unemotional robot people. But they're people with, like, superpowers. And a license to kill. Like murder. Yeah. Okay.

I mean, like, I think there were some John Grisham books to that effect, maybe. Okay, so what about politics? What if being a friend with someone who then gets promoted to the boss gives you, say, an unfair advantage at layoff time? Oh. That, I would hope, I would hope that that wouldn't happen or that like the boss, the manager friend would recuse themselves in that situation. I feel like, I mean, just off the, just my first, my initial thought on this is, you know, like, it's like Supreme Court justices, right? When they have a conflict of interest, when it comes to some case that's come before them, they will recuse themselves. And I think that the appropriate thing to do in that case would be to say, at least for determining whether or not this individual, who is a good friend of mine, should be kept around or laid off with everybody else. I think that that person needs to, that manager needs to talk to his or her manager so that they can determine, so someone else can determine, you know, whether or not the friend is hired or is rather is kept or laid off.

So do you think there needs to be like a conflict of interest form filled out anytime you want to make a friend at work to make sure that those things stay above board? No, I really feel like that's probably the worst idea. I mean you know right and but in in tech companies in particular I feel like it's it's easy to make friends um easier than like you know 15 years ago I worked in like a stodgy old uh insurance company like you know we didn't exactly we were business casual and you know high heels it was very boring um and I had a lot of khaki um and I feel like I feel like uh when it comes to tech companies, there do tend to be a lot more friendships. And I think that when layoffs happen, there's just, there's just, it really, when there's a mass firing like that,

I think you've got to understand that. I would hope that I would understand if my manager was like, I'm sorry, like I had to let you go too. And I don't think I would feel particularly aggrieved by that because I would look around and be like, cool, 50 other people also just got the boot it wasn't me it was it was you know budget cuts or whatever you sound like a very reasonable person that's and that's incredible when i think about some of the dysfunctional companies that i've heard about and i and i realize that i know cronyism has played a part in many a promotion and many a firing it i think it does make it a little bit of a risky proposition If you're in a pretty toxic culture to either befriend or not befriend certain people, you know, like it could get pretty ugly.

Like a like a mean girls kind of situation where you can't sit with them. You know, I think I think there are definitely, you know, in my experience, I've worked at a couple of tech companies and I got a lot of friends who work at tech companies and I'm on Twitter. so i i can see that there is a lot of broken in fact i think every in my experience and and from what i've heard every startup is broken in their own way but like you know it's just like it's like dysfunctional families right they're all dysfunctional and they're in unique way and um and some of them i think are brokener than others and i think you have to learn And, you know, hopefully you can, you know, it's hard to interview a company when you're interviewing for the job and to figure out, like, you know, how f***ed up is this place? Oh, frick.

Oh. I'm going to be both of those and people will be like, what did she say after that? That'll be awesome. You'll never know, listeners. um uh so i think i think that it's you know you you can't know going into um it's you know the same with going into any relationship right you can't know whether or not this person who's really nice it's going to wind up being kind of a psychopath um and i think that companies because companies are people as established by the supreme court i think companies can be psychopaths um

um and uh but you just you're just not gonna that's just not something that you're gonna know until you get there and uh and then yeah then you do have to contend with um you know maybe toxic people hopefully not a full full-on toxic culture um and hopefully you know enough that you can get your work done and uh and find a few find a few friendly faces that that almost sounds like more of an argument for uh referrals right if you just kind of cold join a company it's hard to get a feel like you said in the interview but if you have friends that work there then then you can pretty plainly ask them like what is it actually like what do you hate about it what's what what are the bad things that happen i think that's a good point hopefully

avoid some of that i think you know and i think referrals are obviously a great way of hiring of course there's also a lot of problems that come along with referral hiring because then you start to get you know a homogenous excuse me homogenous um workforce too um and uh you know which which is problematic on its own um and can and then can lead to a workplace that is really great for a certain subset of people and really toxic for others because they're just sort of like how are going to make friends you know yeah i don't fit in here yeah yeah and that's interesting so you might ask a friend and if they kind of fit the mold of the culture they might love it and give a strong recommendation but if you're different from them you might join and then feel pretty

pretty on the outside is that kind of what you're saying yeah i think so i think that it might be um i think that if well although i think i think if your friend works right you get along with your friend and your friend works there uh then you're going to get along with it just fine but yeah there's a possibility that if you if you don't if you don't match the the homogeneity that is present in uh on the team already that like yeah you're you're gonna have a more difficult time and that sucks don't you have don't you have one of those friends who gives you movie reviews and you really like this friend but you really hate their movies they are just such a fan of michael bay and and just his whole scene i mean i have lots of friends who do uh things that i'm

not interested in doing um but i do think but i do really like hearing about those things even like i have a lot of friends who who climb rocks who rock climb and um i i'm pretty sure i could mostly climb rocks is is the inside i think that's the insider term for it and yeah i'm pretty sure I could, I could really care less about it, but I think that if it, um, but I like to hear them talk about it, but I think if it, if it came to finding a job, I would probably ask some pointed questions. You know, I'm not figuring out whether or not I want to rock climb. I'm not figuring out whether or not I want to see a Michael Bay film. I am just listening to my friend talk about a thing that they, that they're passionate about because I, that makes me happy. My friends make

me happy. And, um, and I think that if I was, if I was, though, if I was investigating working at the company that they work for i would i would start to ask more questions um about whether or not i felt that it would be a good fit for me and what my friend thought and etc i just wanted to say one more thing that that made me think of it's uh if if you make friends at work that's that's kind of building your network i hate that phrase but i'm gonna say it anyways like and talked about friends leaving or you leaving the company and you'll kind of spread out into different jobs and that'll give you a lot more options for places you could potentially

go after that. Yeah. So that's kind of one other side of it. And when you say network, you mean your network of moles around the industry. Yes, yeah. For your insider, all of your insider tips. So let me see if I can summarize our conversation at this point. I would agree actually to that point. I think that's a great idea.

And I have literally my eye on several former colleagues of mine that I would just, oh my god, the things I would do to work with them again. so and i think that you know it's good to have it's just like a romantic relationship it's good to miss your it's good to miss your friends sure dave did you want to sum us up i'm going to give it a shot it's my first time doing this though so you'll do great bear with me i believe in you it seems like we're saying that friendship is a hugely valuable and rewarding thing and even

though in the workplace sometimes it can get messy under some circumstances depending on your culture of your work and uh circumstances um and because of reasons um we should do it anyway that's what i'm hearing i think that you know human relationships are far more important than uh than jobs and i mean jobs are super important it's important to feel like you're in charge of your life it's important to feel like you're building skills but it's also uh literally as important to to build relationships and a sense of belonging with others and uh there's there's no reason to draw a line between you know when the universe presents you with a person who you get along with you should you should you should follow that you should keep you should hang out

with them cool cool question answered we did it all right um i will read the next question so i hear a lot about being a good manager but not much about being managed how do i do that how do i be managed it's probably a lot more well it's a lot more gratifying for your ego for sure to talk about managing people like listen sit down and let me tell you how i like led this team and so that that maybe is why there's so much out there right and people do love to talk about their management philosophies yes like like earlier how i talked about the matrix yes yes I could talk forever about the matrix as my management philosophy. Yeah, I think that there is a dearth of information about how to best be managed and to get the most out of that relationship as a person who is subordinate and working on their career, regardless of the career stage, making sure that you want to get support,

making sure that you want that you're getting the kind of projects that are interesting to you and understanding what it is you want from this job what it is you want from your from your team from your colleagues you know what your plans are so that you can communicate those things to your manager and even if you're a manager like you probably still have a manager above you unless you're the ceo right like right you you can always be managed in which case and the ceos directly to god because ceos are divinely appointed yeah that's true yeah i uh so so how do you do that so i think i think that the important thing to do um is to understand your own personality i think there's some self-reflection involved um so i apologize to anyone who doesn't

want to have to oh you mean the myers-briggs test no okay i think i got that sorry um no please don't do the meyer please don't anyone out there listening please don't take the myers-briggs um i was hoping that would be your reaction it's it's not real please don't do it um i've heard it described as horoscopes for nerds yes that's that's a pretty good way to describe it it's oh no please don't take the myers-briggs it's completely like unrepeatable um uh you can't you can't uh it's difficult to to to score in a way that is uh that you can do math on and if you can't do math then you start running into problems of of figuring out whether or not your uh you know any of your stuff works and um that's that's the technical term that

we use in psychology whether or not your stuff works sorry i didn't mean to use such big words for you guys all that technical jargon um and uh but it's the the myers-briggs is not reliable and it is not valid uh and you should not use it but if you are interested in like you know learning something about yourself and people really do like to take little tests you can google something called the big five uh the big five factor big five inventory we just always call the big five so now i'm struggling to to remember what the actual name of it is um we'll we'll bleep out all those names and then i'm fine uh yeah just google big five personality and then you'll you'll get it and there are lots of little like you know um uh tests that you can take online and it'll

it'll score you on five different personality uh traits um extroversion agreeableness conscientiousness open openness to experience and neuroticism um and uh i know because i'm extremely neurotic and because i was a personality psychologist like how i fall in these things and um it's not a good idea to use this as like a you know a hard and fast measurement of this is exactly how i am all the time because situationism still exists but uh situationism is is literally like the how situations you're in affect the way that you behave um anyway but i think that having some idea and understanding that you the reason that maybe you act differently than your friends is because you are literally different um i have a friend i have a friend who's very very agreeable

and i love talking to him because i am the most disagreeable person um i have lots of very strong opinions and um uh can be quite stubborn and he's just like really very willing to just kind of go with whatever and it's great and we both really enjoy each other's personalities um despite the fact that we are so very different because we can each do something that the other cannot um and so i think that even with an exo so the reason i'm saying all of this is to to lead up to an example that if you understand how you are uh just sort of in a general sense your personality then maybe you can get a sense for how your manager is and if you're having clashes or if you have difficulty talking to her then maybe one of the things that's going on is because you're

expecting her to behave or to respond in a way that is not the way that she is just sort of naturally programmed to do just because of how personality works and you know no no two people Some people are incompatible and they really know we're well together. But, like, for the most part, we all get along clearly. Like, look at all the things that the human race has done. But I think that knowing yourself a little bit better can help you know, use your, I feel bad saying use your relationship with your manager. It sounds very Machiavellian, but, like, I don't know. Let's just say leverage.

Yes. you can you can leverage your these these uh these skills to your own advantage which you should absolutely be doing if you are a person who is being managed that's a really interesting viewpoint that i haven't thought of know thyself yes yeah know thyself um uh but i think that um uh the other thing that you really need to consider is like one you need to kind of have a good sense for how what you know what you knowing knowing who you are and doing some self-reflection but also like what your needs and motivations are like what are your actual goals like do you want to work at this company for the next 10 years do you want to

split in a year do you want to move to a different team that's doing something very different one of my colleagues moved from a mobile team to a dev tools so she went from you know doing this like very front-end-y mobile stuff to, like, more back-end-y stuff and maybe even some infrastructure. And, but she was able to do that partly because she understood what her own interests were. And so she talked about these things with her manager. And it sounds really, really basic for me to say that. Welcome to our industry. But I think, you know, like, you should talk to your manager about the things that you want but i think that unless you do a decent amount of self-reflection it can be difficult to know what is the difference between what i want and the path that i'm currently on

and even even what you just said about you should talk to your manager i think a lot of people don't really know what a manager does or what they should do like is this someone who just kind of assigns story points or like what what can they do for me so i think that idea that a manager can help you if they're good achieve your goals um that that's pretty powerful too that some people might not be aware of yeah no i think and if you aren't getting what you need from your manager then you should ask i would start by asking for it but then after that i would i'm not sure what my advice would be my advice would be get a different manager which yeah that's that's the default advice on this podcast if anything ever fails just go get a different job you know we do

that like sometimes the vms aren't working and it's like ah this and then you just destroy and build a new one so i have i have an answer to this question that's um a little bit more like uh tactical i think that ann's answer was incredibly valuable at like a macro level and i have some like day-to-day dumb little things that i do to to be better uh managed um first one is i uh and by the way i'm thinking of the term manager here also as like my team lead so i'm kind of i'm overlapping those a little bit but like most most tech companies do yeah um so like i like to tell them what i'm working on i know this might sound basic but check in check in with your lead and give them a status report um another thing i do that i think

managers really like for the people they manage is I, um, when they ask me for something, I give it to them. Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah. I do that. I did that. Um, I mean, I've only done it a couple of times, but, and, and then if you are unable to deliver the thing that has been requested, or if it's going to be delivered on a different schedule than is requested, I like to notify my leads as soon as possible to say, um, I'm on this, but it's going to be later than I expected. i'm going to tell you that right now and then the other thing i do this is my last thing is uh if someone asks me a question that's going to take some time to answer like say my boss says hey hey dave when is the foobar thing uh you know what's the best parameter for the foobar not

like say it's an email and i'm thinking it's going to take me three days to get that answer rather than waiting three days and then giving the answer i will respond and say i'm working on that i have not forgotten about it and i will get your answer in three days so there you go just uh it sounds to me it sounds to me like you are recommending communication is that the word that might be a psychological industry jargon thing yeah sorry i know it's got a lot of syllables i don't know that that just seems like it would totally destroy the element of surprise and just like suck all the fun out of the relationship yeah right i mean like how can you surprise your manager with with uh with all of your unfinished

tickets if yeah i like to hide in the ceiling if you've told them in the wednesday stand-up that they will not none of them will get done by friday yeah i just like to hide in the ceiling and then like drop down with a box of printed out finished year tickets just like throw them on the desk i'm gonna run off like i'm out of here yeah um i'm sorry that's i really like this actually them having this image of just like someone falling down with a cape and then just like just throwing um note cards everywhere with like you know check marks on them oh yeah yeah because we do yeah the post-it notes yeah like a status oh my gosh this is the best i want to work at that company for like one day yeah for one day after that no yeah i i think uh one thing that

i have noticed consistently is um i feel like i've been pretty lucky to work at places that that reward initiative and are okay with it maybe maybe some workplaces you would get kind of slapped down for stepping out of your place but i feel like i've i've consistently noticed people that do things that i didn't realize i could do when i was in their same situation like someone is just a developer like they have no special responsibility and then they like come up with this thing that helps everyone at the company and i kind of sometimes look at them like huh i could have done that too and i just didn't so i i guess this is a a vague point that means like you can probably influence things more than you think like you don't have to step on people's toes but if you

see something that you don't like or that you think could be better you don't have to wait for someone to give you permission and and i'm sure your manager would love it if you were like i noticed this could be better and here's how i would like to make it better oh yeah that's a cool thing that you could do to that point i will say um a few months ago um my manager was having a meeting with his manager and he wasn't sure about like sort of the um the continued uh focus of the team like what kinds of projects would be working on and i was talking to him about this and he was like i don't really know what we're gonna you know he doesn't really know what we're gonna be doing and i was like you don't need to like wait for him to tell you what you're doing you know what

managers love. Managers love it when you do their work for them. I'm like, you need to walk into that meeting and tell him, here is what we're going to be working on. Like, my team is going to be working on A, B, and C this, you know, this quarter. And, and this is how, like, these are all the things we're going to be doing. What do you think? And then that frees the manager from having to, like, figure out what the hell your team is doing this quarter. And, you know, and then, And then instead, you can focus on, you know, talking between the two of you about how those things are going to be accomplished in the quarter. Or, you know, sometimes even negotiate, of course, like, no, no, no, you're not going to work on this this quarter or whatever. But I think that going to when it comes to being managed, if you go to them with a project idea, then, oh, man, yeah, they're super into that.

so what i want to know is how can i write like a chest thumping medium think piece about being managed because i know how to do that about managing but not not about being managed i think i think there's a i think there's a whole cottage industry behind uh being managed medium think pieces about being managed that that could start right now yeah it's an untapped market and uh yeah we need to come up though with like a uh you know that with with some with some annoying industry jargon we need a hashtag yeah hashtag being managed be the think piece you want to see in the world oh god that's i think is the takeaway i think that's the saddest sentence i've ever heard in my life um uh yeah so well on that note on the the saddest sentence you've ever heard

your life note uh do you want to summarize kind of what we talked about with this question um i think the the main takeaway is uh is to communicate with your manager um that in order like the best way to be managed is in fact to communicate the things that you need and the things that you want and to uh take initiative um i really thought that that point was um was was very good um and and not just take initiative in a you know scrappy kind of get yourself ahead you know of the curve kind of way which is a different topic um but but taking the survivor style initiative right you sabotage everyone else right but the like the like helping out your team and helping your manager actually accomplish things um is gonna go a long way to i think

being managed which is not the same thing as just being like a company yes yes man yes person sure yeah um but i i think that i think that you must be an active participant uh in in your management relationship instead of like a passive person who sits on the other side of the table during the one-on-one and just like goes with it yeah that makes a ton of sense well and thank you so much for coming on the podcast um how can people hear more from you uh they can follow me on twitter uh where they can basically hear me i'm pretty sure my tweets are audible i use don't follow me if you don't like cap lock cap caps lock um i or tweet storms i almost always tweet at least three in a row uh so um i am on twitter at any harder a-n-y-h-a-r-d-e-r which is

sort of like my name but not it's what they used to when i was a kid with my name is ann harder i was called annie so they said annie harder can you do it any harder which is on them which is now that's yeah now it's my famous twitter handle so thanks guys thanks thanks schoolyard bullies yeah the tables have turned yeah well thank you so much for listening um if you want to if you like what you heard and you want to support the show the best way is probably to get a facial tattoo of our logo. If you already have one, though, the second best way is to tweet about us or subscribe on iTunes or write a review. We'd love to share this with more people. So it would really help us out if you could do that. If you want to submit a question for us to talk

about, you can follow us on Twitter at SoftSkillsENG and then just send us a direct message and we'll put it in our queue. So thank you so much. We'll talk to you later. Thank you. This was so much fun. Okay, bye.