Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 152: How to pair program as an introvert and being mistreated as a contractor?

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi guys! Big fan of the show. Here’s a question: What to do if I hate working in pairs? I’m in a tricky situation. I work on a great project in a team of great people We try to implement all the good programming practices. Retrospectives, cross-review, working in pairs.. I hate working in pairs. I am a typical introvert-programmer and the thing I like the most about programming is that you can sit all day digging around the code and NOT communicate with the people. Or at least not all day. But how can I say that to my teammates? “Hey, I would rather work alone than talk to you guys.. By the way, love y’all!” It seems impossible to communicate that to my co-workers without hurting them. And moreover, this is a good practice. Which makes me feel horrible because I feel super-tired after whole day of talking to people. Plus I also feel like somehow I take up their worst qualities: if the person is slower, I become slow too, or start making mistakes. Help!! Hey guys, big fan of the show here. Thanks for your advice and time. The company that I work for provides “tech teams” for hire. In other words, American companies that want to outsource part or all of their tech team to a cheaper location can hire us and get developers and PMs at a fraction of what it costs in the US. I ended up working with an established fitness company based in NY. Their management insists that we are “regular” engineers in their tech team and we should participate in their technical discussions, agile meetings and so on. However, their engineers seem to be on a completely different page and treat us like monkeys that can write some code. For the most part, I can deal with their condescending treatment and everything else they might throw my way. The problem is that the company is currently in a very intense project and they are all “stressed” which seem to provide them license to be extra rude BUT ONLY TO CONTRACTORS. Their managers brush everything under the excuse of stress but I’m sure that wouldn’t fly if we were “regular” team members. How would you handle this situation? Any advice before I lose my temper? I’m also afraid that getting rid of a contractor is much much easier than firing an actual employee.

It takes more than debating the semantics of HTTP status codes to be a great software engineer. This is episode 152 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Okay, status code 152 means great, great work. Great job. What a great HTTP request. What a great, yeah, what a great client you must be.

It's just positive affirmations for the client. i like it that's a good idea like the i mean the 100 series is just underutilized right yeah probably okay now i gotta see if 152 is a thing the only 100 series code i know is the switching protocols one i know all about that one i swear yeah i don't know i don't think 152 is a thing what is this show though it's not about that it's about answering all of your questions about the non-technical parts of software engineering it's a weekly advice show and we will stop talking about http well one could say that we are in the http 100 series because they are considered informational as is our show and the compliments to the client

we should add a new series a new series that's like 600 that's for comedy like specifically for funny stuff and we could be in that one i feel like as soon as it gets written up in a ietf draft document the comedy has been leeched out of it that's like one of the steps of getting approval is yeah removing all comedy one of the best forms for comedy is going through a committee of internet engineers all right let's talk about our wonderful patrons dave do you want to thank these folks yes thank you to those who are contributing at the level that gets them a shout out uh this week we have matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon louise santos nick kantar sean clinton sunny tie sonic the hedgehog and marie rousseau thank you so much

oh and chris hogan almost almost forgot you chris we snuck you in at the last minute there thank you so much to those who are contributing james and if people want to contribute to support the show where can they go they can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon thank you so much to everybody that does that i am going to read our first question hey guys big fan of the show here's a question what to do if i hate working in pairs i'm in a tricky situation i work on a great project in a team of great people we try to implement all the good programming practices retrospectives cross-review work in pairs i hate working in pairs i love the transition from all the good programming practices to saying they hate that one yeah i'm a typical

introvert programmer and the thing i like most about programming is that you can sit all day digging around in the code and not communicate with people or at least not all day but how can i say that to my teammates hey i would rather work alone than talk to you all by the way i love you It almost seems impossible to communicate that to my co-workers without hurting them and moreover This is a good practice Which makes me feel horrible because I feel super tired after a whole day of talking to people Plus I also feel like somehow I take up their worst qualities if the person is slower I become slow too or start making mistakes help. Oh, wow. This question is jam-packed with awesome comments. I love it

Yeah, okay. We got to tackle these things a little bit at a time first. There's an assumption retrospectives cross-review and pair programming are all good programming practices jameson true or false like the answer to every question like that i think it's probably a shrug i i pair program irregularly certainly not full-time and i feel like it's a great tool some of the time i know there are people who will swear by doing it 100 of the time that's part of the extreme program we talked about that a couple weeks ago with netta yeah that's part of the extreme programming philosophy is you pair program on every single line of code right that and the uh nordic death metal this is also part of the extreme program yeah but i feel like it it has its benefits and i also get exhausted and would

quit immediately if someone said hey now you pair program all the time oh i would say no i don't know and then go work somewhere else oh yeah i have not worked in a pair programming environment other than just occasionally pairing with someone on a particular problem. I do not think that it fits in the category of retrospectives and code review and stuff like that. Like those things are, they have become industry accepted, I think, across almost all teams as a good practice. But working in pairs, not so much.

You think it's possible it's harmful? I don't think that it's harmful. Well, maybe, but I don't think that it has achieved the level where most companies have adopted it. Yeah. I agree with you there that it's not the industry standard, like you use version control, you pair program. Those, those are one of those feels like you better do this or you're doing something really wrong. And the other one feels like a choice that you make as part of your culture. Yeah. Yeah. Exhausted at the end of the day of talking to people. I, so I pair program

sporadically in my current job, kind of to focus on solving individual problems as, as needed, or also I do it regularly with everybody on the team to help kind of stay in touch with what the day-to-day experience of developing software is on on the team because i am not always writing code every day but i have in the past done spurts of pair programming where it will go all day or several days and i agree i feel completely exhausted by the end of the day and ready to sit in a dark room and not talk to anybody except for all the noobs on the video game you're playing no i don't talk to them are you kidding me yeah so i i feel you there and that's i've heard people say that that's a feeling that you get more used to and gets better as you do it full time

but to me the benefit of doing it doesn't feel always worth the amount of effort that goes into it I guess where I think it's helpful sometimes for solving problems or resolving issues but I feel like the most comfortable when I can pair when needed to help out or to get help and then go off and and kind of take the results of that by myself and apply it does that make sense yeah where it's it's kind of like a spike i guess okay now do you think let me ask you this you said you feel exhausted at the end of a day of pairing do you think that's because of the interaction the human to human interaction or is it because when you're pairing you're actually like more focused and more intense for a longer duration because you don't have like breaks that you can

take yeah i don't have my twitter breaks yep i wasn't gonna say it but twitter is what i was thinking i think it's both honestly i think i mean it's it's a change from the norm for me to be speaking the whole day. I do a lot of writing and typing and thinking. So, so there's some different energy, but also, I mean, there are times in the day when I'm not as productive and when you're pairing, there's this social pressure to, you can't just goof off while someone is sitting there staring over your shoulder, watching you type. So I don't know, maybe there's a more breaks that need to be scheduled into that or something. That's a long-term practice oh i've yeah when i've done it for days at a time it has been usually focused on

a pretty important problem so we didn't establish a regular cadence of we're going to do this forever and we need to make sure we do it sustainably it's more like we have to solve this thing as fast as possible let's put two brains on it and you all just focus on it really hard so it would have been kind of weird to say i need my hour of twitter not talking to anybody time yeah yeah yeah i've done that too where it's like okay something is urgently broken and we need to get it fixed let's you know all hands on deck but i think you would expect that to be exhausting right like the pairing isn't what makes that exhausting it's the urgency that makes it exhausting and so i don't know i guess i guess now i've kind of wandered into the weeds of debating

whether pair programming is really a best practice but i guess it doesn't really matter in this situation because this is what the company has adopted yeah and that can be subject to a no true scotsman style argument where whatever we say someone can just say well you're not really pairing then if you're doing it this way you need to do it this other way instead and then you will see all the benefits none of the downsides which maybe is true but i don't care i hate it so yeah if if they're stuck pairing what do they do about it yeah like can you reduce the pairing time you spend each day and maybe talk to your manager and arrange for like a pair time and a non-pair time so you can recover i don't know maybe one question is is this an enshrined is this an xp

shop with a capital x capital p because is this a thing that just kind of people do or is it a deeply held value of the company like if you go to pivotal and you say hey i don't love pairing then you will be unlikely to make headway there because pairing is one of the core deeply held beliefs that that they do at their company it's a flag they've planted firmly in the ground yeah so if it's if it's just kind of a thing that has happened you might have more chance pushing back against it but if if this is a place where we all pair and we have decided this is the right way to build software it might be kind of hard to do that yeah unless you smell very badly oh weaponized hygiene yeah i think this is a chance to make it as unpleasant as possible to

pair with you wait remember the episode a few months back about the engineer whose feet smelled really bad i i was just thinking about that yeah maybe you need to go listen to that episode with a totally new perspective yeah wrap take some saran wrap just wrap it around your feet leave them in there to marinate a couple weeks and then you pull your shoes your feet out of your shoes it crinkles and you just unveil them unwrap yep okay i'm ready to start my pairing session And oh, wait, let me just take care of my feet here. Yeah. Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle.

Thanks to this open office environment, I have plenty of room to stretch out. You'll know you did it right if your pair programming companions' eyes start to water. Yeah, they faint. All right. I like it. What else you got? Oh, let's talk about the last bit here. I feel like I take on their worst qualities.

It's like the pair becomes the lowest common denominator. have you seen that or felt that i don't know maybe i am the lowest common denominator every time i get together every time we pair i feel like the other person is about as talented as i am interesting yeah wow i mean that's certainly a hard conversation to have be like listen bob you're too slow to pair with like i am faster than you so one of the times that i had an intense pair programming session with someone that lasted several days i feel like we had a big giant unknown hairy problem and at the end of the session we did not have a complete solution implemented but i feel like we understood it well enough we figured out all the hard parts and all that was left to do was

go do it and i told this person hey we got it i think it would be faster for me to go off and do it by myself and that way you could go on and do other things like the hard part is done and i don't think there'll be very much value in us pairing to finish off the rest how'd that go i don't think they were offended and it took me a lot longer than i thought it would to finish off all the easy stuff i don't think i said like hey you'd only slow me down but i feel like i might have been feeling that a little bit but i was also feeling like it won't be it might be more efficient to pair if we're making a lot of progress on this hard thing but if we're just like chunking stuff out that is it's kind of it's it's the labor part of programming where the thinking is all done we

just have to dig it dig the ditch or whatever the physical metaphor is yeah that's not work that really benefits from two people as much uh and it turns out i was wrong there so maybe i need to pair program all the time i guess huh interesting i have felt the pain where it feels like the pairing session is going in a direction that i feel like is wrong and it and it we we can't steer ourselves out of it for some reason. Like, when have I felt this? I felt this when it feels like both of us are too polite to say, hey, I think this is wrong and bad. And we just kind of middle of the road ourselves down the road to something that we don't like at the end. Oh, that's interesting. Again, you would hear from pair programming aficionados, well, you're just not

pairing correctly. That's a skill you develop and you need to improve your communication with someone else so that you can kind of effectively raise these issues. But I think that's the point of the question of like, why do I have to do this for my job? Like, can I just program instead of figure out how to pair program effectively if I don't like it? Because it is kind of a different skill set. Huh? Yeah. Fascinating. I am just realizing I do not have enough experience pair programming to really comment on this. Too late now. We already started answering the question. Past the point of no return. Well, one thing I do know how to do, though, is influence a team and leadership to change a process and make it work for everyone and if this doesn't

work for you like i really do think you should talk to your manager about arranging a way for you to participate less in pair programming and more in the others and track how that goes for you so that you can compare your productivity while pair programming versus not and then see if you have some you know some nice evidence you can present to say look it would be better if i paired at this ratio or not at all that's a really good idea frame it as kind of an experiment i i do think it's worth bringing up the fact that this is causing you pain though because i think the long-term solution is you'll be miserable and and that doesn't sound that's your long-term solution well the long-term yeah i solved this problem by being miserable phew i'm glad i got

that try that it's not the most effective solution but it is a solution you know maybe i just deserve to be miserable at work solved the long-term effect is you'll be miserable and then you will probably go work somewhere else yeah and that doesn't sound great if you really like the project and you really like the team and and the question asker mentions we're trying hard to implement good programming practices it sounds like they feel like this is this is a good team overall it's just this one thing that they do is really hard for them yeah and and maybe maybe instead of going to your manager and saying i want to change the process or i want to do an experiment, you could just say, look, I'm having trouble working in this environment and describe

your exact symptoms. I go home at the end of the day and I'm exhausted and worn down and I feel like I'm going slower than I should. How do you advise me? How should we handle this? And put the ball in their court and ask your manager to help you solve this problem. There's some irony here because the question asker says, I like the part about programming where I don't have to communicate with people true and if you do not communicate with anyone about this problem your punishment will be more communication true true so it's kind of like you can take your medicine right now and and do some extra communication to raise this issue and try and resolve it or you just have to suffer by talking to people all day yeah i think i agree with dave you should

bring it up with your manager i i like the approach of saying let me try and experiment and see if i i will probably feel better but maybe you should try and quantify that make a little you know those little pain faces at doctor's offices where you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten and if you rate it at ten then they give you a lot of free opiates and then you get addicted to heroin yeah i know that chart yeah i call that the heroin all right yeah exactly heroin okay make one of those for your mood right just say like how do i feel today and and track it maybe while you're doing some pair programming and then track it when you're working by yourself and you can also do other things to track your productivity but if how

you feel is a part of this i think that's fair to collect data on yourself about that yeah that's cool make sure you do not bias yourself though collect it double blinded so you cannot know if you are pair programming or not yeah you'll have to do uh how you would implement i think we call that placebo pair programming where you think you are but you're actually not yeah maybe some kind of like life-sized human doll next to you that just says uh-huh have you thought about using a regex there i don't know you could program it with a bunch of phrases maybe split this method up i think that's probably all you need actually is just that one this feels like it's getting a little messy maybe split it up

that's so funny all right we've solved the problem i think good luck we pair answered yes we did that explains why we're both so exhausted after this show every week yep drenched in sweat jameson just so you know i feel like when we do this show together i am as slow as you i'm sorry my misery knows no bounds i cannot wait to enter my cave again okay let's uh let's jump on to the next question here i'll read it okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says hey guys big fan of the show here thanks for your advice and time you're welcome anonymous listener all right anonymous listener goes on to say the company that i work for provides, quote, tech teams for hire. In other words, American companies that want to outsource

part or all of their tech team to a cheaper location can hire us and get developers and PMs at a fraction of what it would cost in the US. I ended up working with an established fitness company based in New York. Their management insists that we are, quote, regular engineers in their tech team, and we should participate in their technical discussions, agile meetings, and so on. However, their engineers seem to be on a completely different page and treat us like monkeys that can write some code. Oh man. Ouch. Okay. Continuing. For the most part, I can deal with their condescending treatment and everything else that they might throw my way. The problem is that the company is currently in a very intense project and they are all quote stressed, which

seems to provide them license to be extra rude, all caps, but only to contractors. Their managers brush everything under the excuse of stress, but I'm sure that wouldn't fly if we were quote regular team members how would you handle the situation any advice before i lose my temper i'm also afraid that getting rid of a contractor is much much easier than firing an actual employee well it is it actually is and that's part of why that's part of the point oh yeah this is a rough situation this has been in the news recently too oh what was that oh just some controversy about google where they they i mean it happens at a bunch of big tech companies but google treats its contractors much differently than its full-time employees and part of that is

legal restrictions where if you treat contractors the same as full-time employees it turns out that the u.s government at least considers them full-time employees and you can be required to pay benefits to them oh so some of it is not fun stuff to joke about it's like the law and sucks i mean it doesn't require them to be rude but it's gonna say wait you mean it's it's illegal for them not to be rude to you space lair not earth lair all the usual caveats okay but my understanding is um they they cannot participate in some of the fun company perks and i could see how that comes across as like this vague vibe of we're not the same as you because you can't hmm yeah okay do those perks include not getting yelled at no that was not on the list it was

things like coming to company retreats okay and this was the google case you're describing it's a mix of everything mushed together in my mind okay well yes very strange situation well i wish i could say this was a strange situation but unfortunately i think this is actually all too common when you literally created on purpose a class hierarchy of employees and then told them they have to work together as equals yeah rough situation i mean your your value as a human is not lessened the the fact that you get paid less money because it's cheaper people are weird like they get they their brains work in weird ways our brains work there those humans their brains work so strangely good thing i am a sentient sun lamp not subject to those weird human brains like just

knowing that someone is cheaper could make you treat them differently and it's not okay and it doesn't make it right but that there's a lot of things fighting against you here i guess i guess that's the summary of my comments about all the legal restrictions it's not like it's fine it's more like the deck is a little bit stacked against you here yeah not only you know not only are you in this different category of employee who doesn't participate in some of the team building stuff and company offsites and all that. But also you're probably in a very different time zone and geographically isolated. So they only ever see you as a pixelated image on a video screen and they don't have the full signal of all of your body language and emotions. And they don't even

think of you as the kind of person who comes to work every day and goes home and has a life and all those other things. As bad as that sounds, it's kind of human nature. So yeah, this is super rough situation yeah condescending treatment stressed rude but only to contractors i'm trying to think of times when i've worked with contractors we hired some contractors at a company i worked at once they were pretty isolated though we basically handed them requirements and they handed us back a project and after that was done we spent a long time cursing them as like traditional right like oh these contractors didn't know how to do stuff right but we didn't interact with them very much so you only yelled at them when they weren't there

yeah behind their backs once they had their money right and this wasn't offshoring for cost-cutting reasons or anything it was more like we just we need more hands to get this one project done and we feel like it can be isolated enough to be done and delivered without being too disruptive and it turns out that was a pipe dream but yeah but we tried it turns out if you hand someone a document and don't talk to them for three or four months and then see what they give you back it might not be very good or work very well for your problem hmm i wouldn't have guessed who would have thought but this sounds like they're much more involved in the team if they're around enough to be taking the brunt of rudeness they're they're somewhat integrated together the

two teams which stinks yeah that is this is a this is bad and i think i want to stress people shouldn't do this to contractors and and i can say that i have myself been guilty of treating contractors with less respect than they deserve because of this exact kind of arrangement where you know we have a team they're far away they can't stand up for themselves because they're asleep you know that's how you lose every argument when you are asleep yes and it's just an easy target and i think i think it requires a special level of effort cognitive effort to bring a team like this in as first-class citizens and make them feel as respected as you would your teammates who you face every day in the lunchroom you know walking down the hall and everything else so i

wish i could say this was an uncommon situation but i think it's common enough that even i have experienced it and and other and i know many others have too so what do you do though in this situation. And I think this is a pretty similar situation to where if you were like an intern working on a team, or you're maybe the only remote employee working on a team, even if you're not a contractor, I think that the burden is on you to do extra work to show the quality of your work. Because otherwise, for whatever reason, human nature will default to blaming the person who's not in the room. And so remote folks like me, I'm currently in a remote arrangement. I know, you're also in that situation we have to communicate even more than we do in person

to tell you don't just have to do a good job you have to make sure other people are able to see that you did a good job so i think that makes sense if the problem was kind of the quality of their work it sounds like it's not really people are stressed out and and the contractors are the punching bag though it's not just they're not working effective they're not getting their work done or people are taking their work for granted it's more like they're getting yelled that or condescended to or something. Good point. Yeah, good point. I kind of missed that. Yeah, you're right. The managers press everything under the excuse of stress. So it's like, okay, so you've talked to the managers. The managers are basically saying, yeah, they're stressed. Don't worry about

it. But you don't want to keep getting beat up all the time. So now, do you stand up for yourself? Like if someone treats you like crap or yells at you, do you say, hey, that's not appropriate? Yeah, this is really hard partially because of one of the causes of the problem is this power imbalance and it turns out that makes it harder to address it too if you're if you're this different class of employee they mentioned is explicitly getting rid of a contractor is much easier and yeah it is yeah i mean i think it is you are a human being and you are deserving of respect the challenge is how do you try to get that without causing a fight or getting fired yeah or getting your contract ended i think it is worth bringing up to the management if they've

insisted your regular engineers on their tech team and that you should participate it sounds like they're trying to support the contractors and trying to trying to integrate you all together maybe maybe they're so it's a stressful project i'm kind of reading between the lines maybe there's some deadline crunch and that's why they brought in outside help is to help them get it done but they've they've at least shown interest in making things work smoothly together so i think if you bring it up to them as a first step and say hey it feels like contractors are being treated differently their managers brush everything under the excuse of stress yeah i don't know being stressed out doesn't excuse bad behavior it might explain it but it doesn't make it okay and if it

happens repeatedly i think you can still say like i understand they're stressed they still treat me this way here are the incidents that make me feel like it's harder to work together and get my get my job done. Yeah. And, you know, to a certain extent that there's going to be a manager on the contracting side, right? Someone who's responsible for managing that team, or at least managing the relationship between the contractor, sorry, between the companies, the two companies, maybe that person is the right person to help tackle this problem. Because surely this isn't the first time where one of their contracting teams has been mistreated by virtue of the contracting relationship. And that being the case, it seems like you should be able to go to that

person and say this is happening and it's their job to help manage it i'm remembering all the legal training stuff i sat in about contractors and i'm pretty sure the advice i just gave would cause them to have a heart attack where the contractor would go to a manager of the of like a full-time manager employee of the company and say like help me resolve this management thing i think according to them that's a big no-no oh because because you're asking the manager to manage you now yeah exactly and that's that's integrating you more tightly in the company and making the the relationship more blurry i i think so wait a minute if you understand you correctly you're going to go in there and talk to that manager and you're going to come out with health

insurance exactly yeah that's true this is great the only outcome as soon as they make eye contact you say oh gotcha you owe me benefits i don't know how it works for for outsourcing stuff like this where they're offshore or they're in a different country again space lawyer all the usual caveats apply but i think i think dave's advice is more sound in this situation where there should be someone on your side to help support you it's possible their incentives are like don't get us fired though yeah it could be the customer is always right like you you're actually in a customer vendor relationship here where a client is treating you poorly basically yeah yeah and they're always right yeah so by definition they're not mistreating you yeah and

i'm saying that tongue-in-cheek but like that could be the mentality from company support on your side yeah well why don't you stop being so dumb and get getting yelled at all the time yeah this is hard why did we pick this question this is hard no how are we gonna answer this we should start we should hire a contracting team to screen our questions better yeah and we can also yell at them someone to blame when it all goes wrong when we fall on the wrong side of the tabs versus spaces debate yep yeah it's a it's a tricky situation and um i think actually part of being a contractor actually, and I'm going to say this, this might be a little controversial, but part of being a

contractor is having a little bit more thick skin because you sacrifice a lot of protections. You know, you're not getting the benefits. You could be fired on a whim. And I think that kind of comes with the territory. Now, it's not great territory to be in, but once you're there, I think learning how to thrive in that kind of environment where you're disposable, you're going to get mistreated sometimes, and you don't have the management support from the company that you're supposed to be supporting means you have to develop a special set of skills beyond just engineering skills yeah and there's another point which is that teams and companies that are just killing it that know exactly what they're doing have everything under control those are not the folks

that often turn to external contractors to help out it's good it's often when stuff is going wrong you need somebody right away there's this huge deadline there's there's some specialized skill set that you need to pull in, you usually come into a kind of weird situation. And I felt that when I was contracting by myself too, I was, I was a solo contractor and that's, that was my full-time employment only source of income for a while. And it was a much different environment than when I worked as a full-time employee at, at companies because they were all people that needed Jameson and were willing to pay the contracting rates. You know, like there's, there's a reason this happens. Yeah. That's a good point. I didn't experience anything like this though, to be

clear in this, that I'm not saying this is okay. It's just, it's different. Yeah. They're an established fitness company. Maybe they only respect strength. Maybe you need to run a four minute mile deadlift, 500 pounds. One of the bars for powerlifting competitions is if you can clear a thousand pounds between the bench and the squat and the deadlift. So you need to do that. Okay. you'll never get yelled at again if you can yeah never get yelled at again if you can if you can show a thousand pounds in your powerlifting competition results among the big three lifts you know i actually thought of a good solution here what is it pair programming that's actually not the worst thing ever force them to pair program with you and then i just

listen back to what i said like dave had an idea it wasn't the worst idea ever that's not what i so unusual dave you did it you had a not the worst idea ever idea why dave look at you what i meant was that's a that's a good idea actually i know you're you're kind of being tongue you did it again you said actually you can't help yourself dave what a great idea period Okay, good. I'm no longer offended. I mean, we did talk about this gap where part of the cause of this is because they see you as less real than their coworkers, right? So it's easier to take out their emotions on you. So if you increase the communication, pair programming is one way to do that. You get

to know each other a little bit, develop a better relationship. I have seen this in myself as well with people that are far away from me doing work where I am more quick to be skeptical. I need to vet them a little bit more in my head. And then as soon as we work together a little bit, I develop this idea of them as, oh, like they're a real life human being. And I was dumb and wrong to think these things about them beforehand. But for some reason, my brain just jumps to that. Like you said earlier, like scary outsider people, they must be wrong. Yeah. There is something to be said for people who are suffering together where you kind of bond together you know like like everyone i went to college with for example you know but then also also if you can bring someone into that

circle with you and say i'm here to suffer alongside you you know we're in this together we're solving this problem together i know we're we are under stress it's not that you guys are under stress of course they're they're thinking maybe that if if this project goes so badly that the company tanks you guys will just go on and pick up the other gig but they're going to all be out on the street looking you know looking for work which is kind of ironic because you know you are also the source of their income or rather the company is a source of the contractor's income so that would be a good way to turn it around is you start bullying them like i need this money guys yeah screwing this oh you tied to this failing project what a sucker my health insurance is not

mine from the contracting company my health insurance fans projects financially sound oh it feels great okay we've got a just a whole menu of solutions here for you i think you're good to go i think you are all right best of luck with that what can people do if they want to ask us questions like this and hear us stumble around go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question thank you so much to those who have asked the questions are great And we love you. Catch you next week.