Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 153: Informal Leadership and Dealing With Burnout (rerun of episode 71)

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

This episode is a rerun of episode 71 from August 2017. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’m sometimes an informal lead on project teams. How do I help the team get stuff done as a peer? How do I deal with burnout after an extended period of crunch time? Jamison mentions the blog post by Jamis Buck called To Smile Again where he talks about his experiences with burnout.

Greetings podcast listeners, this week we're bringing you a rerun of episode 71 from August 2017. Next week we'll be back with a new show. It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 71. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers as well as squash soup. So, that's what you're having for lunch. That is correct.

I am so creative. I am creative, and you are just a great detective. Yeah, we make a good team. Is 71 a milestone of any kind? Is it prime? I don't... It feels prime. It feels pretty prime.

It's not even, so it's prime. That's how the algorithm works. Boy, we could... We have a thing or two to teach mathematicians about finding prime numbers. It's so easy. listen you guys are like crunching away on these giant supercomputers just why look at the least significant look at the last yeah it's fine prime that's called dave prime that's right it's a dave prime uh maybe in dog years this is like an auspicious age to reach or something yeah it's

like anyways triple a dog life yeah uh we have a bad interview experience this one languished in our queue for a while uh but we finally got to it and i think it's hilarious so i'm gonna read it all right right out of graduate school i was in the process of interviewing and got through two phone interviews to get to the final in-person interview at a location-based startup the office was mostly sales but it also had a small dev team the in-house recruiter gave me the rough itinerary two days before get there at eight have an hour or have a four hour long interview with the team and then possibly a short coding quiz um i get to the office 20 minutes early but have to wait 45 minutes more for my first round of interviews because the internal meeting went over the

recruiter apologized to me and asked me if i wanted breakfast i said i'll take something small like a bagel and she said okay and then disappeared never to be seen again i got through the culture interviews just fine though i thought it was a bit odd that several of my interviewers brought in their catered breakfast and lunch into the room but never offered me some and i had to go find my recruiter so i could get a cup of water between the interviews this is all i just assume this is hazing at this point they were like look you need to be this is like surgery you need to be fasting when you come to the interview wait do they do that in surgery yeah you can't eat like 24 hours before the surgery or something

oh before the oh i thought you were saying like surgeons get interviewed no while they're what is that to test their mettle somehow i believe it those people are usually pretty hardcore yeah oh yeah okay it's yeah it's because the coding quiz they give you would make you throw up maybe yeah exactly it might empty your stomach when you see our interview process you're gonna want to have nothing in your digestive system the okay the final interview was with who would have been my boss the senior engineering lead she asked me the normal bank of engineering questions and then let me ask anything she also sent me some vibes that the engineering team isn't really respected and that as a junior i'd be expected to put in overtime and be on call on

weekends without comp time without being able to say when i would be on call then i got some seemingly weird questions do i work well with loud noises how noise canceling are my headphones usually what yeah she then asked me if i was ready for the live coding exercise i responded with i was told this was a written test she rolled her eyes and ranted for 10 minutes about how the recruiters never pay attention to the engineering team's process also they don't bring you food when they offer it to you yeah these are your recruiters actually like sneaky gnomes who are just trolling people they're just like little little fake creatures who are like we said we'd get him a bagel and we didn't our prank has been successful

okay uh i asked to postpone the exercise as i just went through four hours of interviews and hadn't eaten anything they could not postpone because they had to make a decision with within 48 hours so that they could onboard someone at the beginning of a sprint oh boy as a jobless person i acquiesced and started working i was brought to her desk and handed a 13 inch ibm thinkpad a piece of paper with half a page of marketing copy on it another piece of paper that was a grading rubric and a pen i was given 90 minutes code a design that i could find in a png on the desktop the laptop had no internet connection the only software it had on it was notepad plus plus and the marketing copy on the piece of paper was the stuff i was supposed to type into my markup

what without a color picker or a psd to get font sizes or accurate margin padding and no internet to check why some of my css was broken i was coding pretty blind uh to top it all off i didn't have any noise canceling headphones and the sales team hit a large gong every time a sale was made and was blaring really bad hip-hop to get hyped up to make more sales it all makes sense you could just hear like the chest bumps as they like bro down in the other room yeah bro then you hear the the smack of chests hitting each other in a big gong i got about 30 of the design done by the end of the time allotted but i hadn't done it that well based on the rubric i had failed anyway the engineering lead took me

into the recruiter's office so i could wrap up the day but the recruiter had left early and nobody knew where she was so i was escorted to the front door by the receptionist and left another gnome trick i didn't hear back from them yeah uh so that sounds so good in so many ways um i i don't know i i just love the detail of asking how noise canceling your headphones are and then in the coding quiz you're like oh that's why they asked that question i mean at least it was representative right like it's like yeah this is how you will work so if you can't work this way yeah oh so maybe it really i mean it sounds like they thought you failed the interview but also you dodged a huge bullet there oh yeah yeah plus you have that you now have a gem you have a story

you can tell forever yeah yeah developers love to like throw down about no my interview was the worst but i think you you score pretty high yeah this is hard to top yeah so how well do you write code in loud noisy environments it was like like really how good are your noise canceling headphones there's like foghorns under all the desks that go off your desk is here behind the 747 jet engine we turn it on every 10 minutes to make oh my gosh just keep people on their toes well good thing you didn't get that job um should we read our first question yes we should are you are you just like marinating still in the story it was so good yeah so i oh they made you type in just by hand like a page of printed text

it's great oh man how are your typing skills let's find out i'm you've seen men in black right uh yes all three of them you know that part where they take at the first one where they make them do a test and they're in these like weird egg-shaped chairs that don't really have a place to like put your paper and their pencils are all broken and stuff and there's that one table that will smith courageously drags over and then he like passes the test yeah i feel like interviews that are this bad are always some kind of like either their performance art or there's some psychological experiment performance art no you were supposed to leave the interview and go hunt down a bagel and then you would have passed the first part and the second part was you were

supposed to like go over to the sales team and turn down their hip-hop music and take their gong back with you and then you code the quiz and then when you finish you ring that gong every every time the dev team closes the ticket they ring a gong we're now sales bros we're crushing it over here I just can't stop laughing you failed that interview the moment you didn't follow that recruiter

who promised you a bagel it was a whole different interview if you had followed her there was another team waiting to interview you and she just sighed sadly as you stayed in the room we lost another one we lost them ah okay breathe dave all right question time let's help people okay oh okay i'll read our first question okay there's no bagels here though

no okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says oh my gosh if anyone sends in a story that can top that i will just be so happy we'll send you two stickers that's right okay this question comes from an anonymous listener it says we have been rapidly expanding occasionally i am given a team of my own to complete a product or feature my position as a lead isn't formalized i am sent off to champion and coordinate developers without any managerial power i think this is a great opportunity for me unfortunately i find myself struggling with an internal balance of not dictating things to developers who are technically my direct peers

and showing management my ability to lead and produce results do you have any advice about how to finesse this leader but not leader situation and general tips for first making this transition when you're not a senior developer love the podcast and thanks you're welcome have you tried creating a totem or item of ceremonial power and just holding that like a conch yeah or some kind of staff with like a cool crystal on the end or i guess maybe maybe on the end would be like a smashed up old iphone or something because it'd be more more techie related but it's sapphire some kind of yeah yeah some kind of item that you just hold and then people automatically do what you say sounds like a way to get people's respect and authority i think that's called a gun actually

there is one of those things it's the threat of violence it's not very ceremonious but it works yeah don't don't do that hmm so it sounds like they they mentioned transitioning when you're not a senior developer so they they are not a senior dev and there are no senior devs on their team um they're they're actually i trimmed out some stuff there are a couple of senior developers on the team uh who are technically leading the team but but what the question says is that um occasionally this person is given a team of their own to go complete a product or feature but it's not formally assigned as a lead developer on that team so like they're on a team yeah i'm having a hard time reconciling this because it says lead this team to get the feature done they're

just like you work with these people get this feature right but it says i am given a team of my own and i don't know if that means it's just like the temporary sub team that you're a member of or if it's a temporary sub team that you are responsible for and a member of i don't know i guess yeah i don't have a way to answer that yeah i don't either let's let's assume that there's some degree of authority being given here but it's not managerial and certainly it wouldn't be recognized by the hr department who carries the staff of managerial authority yes they do have that it's called the spreadsheet with everyone's salaries um yeah so it it sounds like especially that last part about i don't want to dictate things to people who are technically my

peers but i also want to get stuff done it sounds like you believe that if you were a capital m manager or capital L lead, then you would have the power to dictate to your no longer peers what to do. And they'd be like, they'd be fine with that because you would have the power. And in my experience, that's a real crappy way to work with people, not even just lead. It's also a crappy way to lead, but boy, does it stink to work with someone like that. So I would question your whole approach i so when you are the lead or manager you do have the responsibility to get stuff done in a way that doesn't fall on the rest of the team but just turning that responsibility into a dictatorship on the team is a great way to make your team not like you and make smart people

not work there yeah yeah yeah i i want to give the listener the benefit of the doubt as well but i'm I'm hearing this undertone, like what you're saying, Jamison, the undertone being if only management would bless me with the authority, then I could tell everyone what to do and not feel bad about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I feel bad telling them what to do now because they're my peers. Right. But I wouldn't, but, but if only I could tell them what to do and have them not be my peers. Yeah. Then it would be okay. And, and the big secret to leadership in engineering and maybe even everywhere else is that um leadership is actually not about telling people what to do it is about inspiring supporting and serving the people who you are responsible for driving

consensus within that group and helping them achieve their goals and uh being the kind of leader that they want to follow and that they want to uh that basically inspires them to do what they already know they need to do right um not i think nobody likes to work for a manager or lead who hands out tasks and orders and um tells you to do the job their way because they said so and they are the one holding the badge yeah and and that also just doesn't scale as well because if they're looking to you to tell them what to do that means you have to know what everyone should be doing all the time and and you have to be so down in the details and and micromanaging things that you can't do the broader things like uh supporting the team like dave said

um it it's infuriating and and stressful and and also it just doesn't scale to larger teams and larger problems it also doesn't scale along the dimension of your own professional growth because being a team lead might not be a destination for you and if you get so caught up in the details of doing other people's jobs for them you will never be able to grow to even the next level of responsibility for you yeah so uh i i think this sounds like we're giving you the smackdown but i think it's good news because the thing you should be doing is easier than the thing you want to do which is um you should be helping the team decide stuff i i think people that you work with in general have great ideas and and if you bring those ideas out and

help the team agree on them they will get things done faster and better than if you just say this is the way we're doing it even if your idea in a vacuum is technically better the fact that it's just being shoved down people's throats will make there's a lot of ways you can make a good idea not deliberately or or or inadvertently um but ideas that come from the team that the team agrees on and likes are are easier to implement well that's right and um everything we're saying right now i think applies not only in your position uh in other words without authority you have to exercise these skills but even once you do have that authority you will still have to exercise these same skills in fact maybe even more so when you're in a position of authority because people

will actually follow your ideas sometimes to their own detriment if your ideas aren't that great right yeah i mean i i have seen this go down when i was at a previous job and had a position of authority and i i miscommunicated some ideas repeatedly by using a word that was ambiguous that I didn't realize was ambiguous. The word was prioritize. And I would say, okay, team, I'm handing you this bug to prioritize. And you can interpret that two ways.

And about half the people in my organization interpreted it one way and half the people the other way. And that was about half thought it meant select an appropriate priority for this bug and fix it along with your other priorities. The other half of the people thought it meant make this a high priority and fix it quicker.

um and oh man it was so bad for me because it was like all this time i thought i was telling them to select an appropriate priority they interpreted it as something else and then they did it even though it was a bad idea it wasn't even the idea i wanted them to do and so yeah um you have to exercise so much more care in how you lead and influence people once you do have that authority that practicing it when you don't have the authority is great it's also just the way you work with peers yeah it turns out commanding your peers what to do inspires resentment and i mean smart people don't want to be told what to do they want to come up with solutions together with other people and and if someone just tells them like

listen you're not as smart as i am do this thing then then they'll just quit and then suddenly you'll have people that only need to be told what to do because all the people that don't need to be told what to do will go somewhere else natural selection yep survival of the most compliant yeah if so that's kind of addressing the the um leading without leading side but if we address the um we can we can also talk about the other side which is like you seem to feel some special responsibility towards getting stuff done that maybe the rest of the team doesn't okay and that might be leading you to try and like clamp down a little bit and take control a little bit more i don't think it's bad that you feel more responsibility to get stuff

done but you just have i think you have to go with the harder solution which is the better solution which is don't let that responsibility turn you into a dictator because i don't think that will help get stuff done anyways it doesn't matter how many steve jobs biographies you read just like screaming at people for most people doesn't doesn't work very well yeah unfortunately i've tried not that you're screaming at people but so can we go to um how do you influence others without authority and talk about some techniques for that i mean one technique isn't really a technique it's just be right a lot just establish trust with the team and then you're still not saying here's what we have to do listen up here's what we're going to do you just say you use your

experience and your reputation to to lend weight to your suggestions but you still bring suggestions to the team i think in addition to making suggestions it it pays to take the time to explain why you think these are the right things to do. You know, do put actual weight behind it in the form of evidence that other people can relate to. I think sometimes things feel right to us as an engineer, but it's actually much harder to take that feeling and transmit it to someone else in a way that they can internalize as well. And so saying things like, I'd like to propose X for the following reasons. It will buy us X amount of value in this way. It will save us this much pain in this way um and here are some bad things about my idea that i think are trade

offs we also need to be aware of as we're making this this decision you know and if you lay those things out for people oftentimes in written form uh i think people will be more likely to follow you because they can see that you've thought it all the way through and then they can they can internalize your argument just like you have yeah that makes a lot of sense i think a theme with that is you are you're addressing people's concerns you're not commanding them yeah yeah hmm hmm also you could promise to provide bagels and then disappear i've heard that that might conduct psychological warfare on your teammates maybe bring in a gong bring in a gong bring in two gongs one gong is for bugs that get opened and the other one is

for when they get closed well good luck i mean i actually think that the fact that you're thinking this way bodes well for your future and i and i say that because what i see is someone who is responsible cares and is engaged and wants to do that um i think that not everyone is like that not everybody wants to be engaged at that level and so that's great i think it'll be a good opportunity for you i do think that you need to be super careful to not put too much weight on official authority that has to be given to you before you can start influencing others for good yeah i also i want to just tell one quick story about a great technical manager that i had um it was at my last job i worked with a guy named joel delin who's the ceo of kawali um there were

like i don't know not that many employees when this happened so he was still a little bit in the weeds of managing this team and we wanted to decide on a technology for uh this new project that we were going to start and it was basically like the boring established technology that we knew well and the fancy new just insanely futuristic yet also a little bit untested technology and um his approach to this was to just get the team in a room uh schedule an hour and have us all like talk it out and we wrote down pros and cons and we talked about like what happens if the people who love it quit and then the team is left with it what happens if uh but what about the effort it would save us if all these productivity benefits pay off and and we

just talked it out and he expressed an opinion and then he said but that's my opinion and i i want you to take it as a member of the team not as what you should do the team is going to decide what you do and then just come back and tell me what you decide so he kind of like led a discussion um we decided uh it turns out we made the wrong decision and he let it happen for a while and and then we fixed it later and the wrong decision was not the decision he recommended but he was okay with it because he was he placed more value on the team deciding than on them doing what he said when the when the team decided did he already know that was going to be or did he already believe that that would be a bad out a bad decision yeah yeah yeah he was like i think

you should do the other thing he'd let you go completely against this we want to do yeah we want to do this thing and he's like okay if you want to you're i mean you're the ones who are gonna do it so it's your funeral yeah yeah that's awesome and it's since been surprise surprise we chose the fancy new thing and then it's since been rewritten in the boring established thing but let that be a lesson there's a lot of lessons i learned from that but one of them was i could tell he was just like raging inside to try and avoid telling us no you're not gonna do that and he successfully did that oh man like could you see like his veins popping but he's smiling and like nodding politely yeah yeah i don't know i know the kind of person joel is and and he he

wants us to make the right decision but also he wants people to grow and learn and and have ownership more than he wants them to make what he thinks the right decision is a lot of the time that might be my favorite just microcosm example of of what i think great technical leadership is even though it involved the team making a stupid technical decision. It's still great. So there's a wonderful book that I suggest to our listener and anyone who wants to be an engineering leader or frankly, any leader for that matter.

It's called Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. And one of the attributes that she identifies as being a strong leader attribute is what she calls a debate maker, which is a leader's ability to get people to engage in an argument. And I don't mean like contentious fighting, but rather debating the merits of ideas with each other on their own grounds without having to like ultimately be the decision maker and it sounds like joel did a great job with this like he let

the team come together he let the team debate the various ideas and then ultimately they decided together even though it was against his his suggestion right but the team debated it and and came up with their own idea even though it turned out to be wrong yeah i i think the key was he valued the culture of engineering ownership and autonomy more than making what he thought the right decision was in this specific thing and and that was a thing that is like written on the walls there and we talked about meetings and stuff but like it really happened there awesome um so it was cool to see cool question answered question answered you want to read our next one yes i will read the next question uh this is from antonin who we answered questions

from before good job asking good questions antonin it probably means you have bad things happening in your life so sorry about that is that the theme for every one of our question askers it's like every single one of them is suffering in some horrible yeah exactly no one's ever like everything is fine what should i do just keep going good job all right antonin says how do you deal with burnout after an extended period of crunch time both as a company and as an individual at my job i just finished a six-week sprint from hell and now i find myself unable to focus both at work and in my personal life i feel too burnt out to read code fun stuff or do anything productive and obviously to work i want to get back to my usual self but i'm

struggling on top of that my co-workers are feeling similarly as an individual what would my best bet be in terms of recovery as a senior developer or de facto team lead what would be the best thing i could do for my co-workers look just binge watch netflix until your eyes are just so bloodshot you've been awake for 40 hours straight watching tv and then i think you should feel better so what you're suggesting is you burn out on being burnt out exactly exactly you have a six week netflix sprint you'll be so happy to get back to work so i i think every year or two i experience uh some amount of burnout and sometimes it results in me quitting but sometimes it is just a thing i deal with and then and then get over it and i don't think i have like a hard and fast

solution for it because if I did I wouldn't experience it that regularly but I know what helps me when I'm feeling that way one of the main things is I have to take on smaller things that are more easily like measurable and digestible so when I'm not burnt out I can take on these broad undefined tasks like we need a new back end go figure out what it needs to do and how you're going to build it and build it and when I'm feeling super burnt out it's like go through and fix up all the styling errors in our code base or like it's i don't know there's a word i can't think of normalize it's not normalized um well i don't know like the the css is all weird so we have like different paddings everywhere and all our buttons go go make those consistent or

like consistent defy consistent defy that's the word uh or or like go take on a bunch of these small little bugs that are quality of life improvements but not like show stoppers you know they're not hard to fix but they'll also be some measurable outcome and and doing this helps me feel like i'm still accomplishing things and providing value because if i don't do that then it kind of feeds into the burnout feeling of i can't get anything done and then i don't get anything done and then i think i can't get anything done and i don't get more done so yeah it kind of spirals a little bit so breaking out of that spiral helps a lot for me personally yep have you ever like taken a sabbatical or just some extended period of time

just like uh more than just like a few days off no no never in my life and i actually it's the thing i want to do i'm gonna do it um this year probably at the end of the year i'm just gonna go like a month without doing any client work okay um but no i'm i'm horrible at disconnecting on vacations i have a friend co-worker who i've known for about 10 years and about every four or five years he takes like a 12-week vacation just something crazy you know and he takes it as an opportunity to reassess what's important to him which happens naturally by the way when you disconnect from your regular routine you start to realize that a lot of what you do is just following the day-to-day demands

that get levied on you kind of incidentally. And he takes it as an opportunity to get more purposeful about what actually is important to him. And so far, every time he's done this, he comes back and quits his job. So you don't have to do that part, I think, but it is a great way to take stock and kind of reboot. but also it's kind of uh it's kind of a blessing of the privileged not everyone can afford to just take 12 weeks off of their job um i couldn't even afford the health insurance to do that

let alone the time without income but um anyway it might be something you do it's not something i've ever done but man when this guy reports to me what it was like when he got back it's just like it's like he's a whole new person with all these new ideas about what makes him happy and hole i think i've talked about this on the show but we had a several months of crunch time at one of my earlier jobs and we worked with um great people who after the crunch time recognized that the team needed some time to recover um so we we i mean we still came in i think they just gave everyone a few days off right after the crunch time and then when they came back in um when the team came back in we basically decided that we would do a couple weeks of of low stress work

basically so we identified some refactoring things to do we it was basically the kind of work i talked about like a lot of fixing up and cleaning up and um things that make the team feel better that aren't very stressful yeah and i think that helped um it was a pretty crappy time in the crunch time i haven't had a time like that since and i don't want to but i don't have any lingering resentment over i feel like we were we were taken care of well after that's cool one thing i found that works really well to get out of burnout at work without just quitting your job or taking a long vacation is to try to work on a green field project something brand new you don't have you know all this brownfield legacy requirements to keep in mind you can start fresh and try to deliver

something from start to finish um for you and your team i mean the question asker says for me and my my company and i have found that that can be totally rejuvenating just to start over from scratch on something brand new so maybe are you thinking kind of like a hack week thing where you just take a week so make a new project or just a new business i actually think hack weeks can be detrimental uh to the burnout problem um i have because um he specifically mentioned that he's having a hard time focusing i've actually so i've done five hack weeks in one per year for the last five years and after each one i found the team had a really hard time recovering their focus afterwards it took several weeks uh to get back into the groove no so i don't think a hack week

i think what you should do is embark on a new project greenfield if it's possible i bet it's not that's yeah that sounds nice if you can do it i think that if if you're a leader and you know that your team is having to go through a crunch time one way to orchestrate the recovery from the crunch time is to try to schedule things so that after the crunch you can focus on building something new and exciting yeah although maybe it was a new and exciting project that led to crunch time in the first place so that could backfire yeah i think also as a leader just acknowledging that burnout is a thing and people are feeling it helps a lot because some people might be suffering silently and just feeling miserable and feeling like there are all these

expectations that they're now not meeting yep but acknowledging that the team needs some time to recover and, and, and demonstrating that through vacation or, uh, or whatever your personal techniques are for dealing with it. I think that could help a lot. So I don't deal well with burnout, um, generally, but I do have two techniques that I use to fight it. Uh, the first technique that I've used and is not what I recommend because it actually sucks a lot is quitting your job.

And I know that we joke a lot on this podcast about how quitting your job is like the universal answer but if you have a decent job you're just burned out quitting your job actually really sucks and after quitting my job sometimes i look back and i go i was burned out and frankly if i could have just taken a few weeks off i would be fine now but now i have to start this whole new job and build rapport with my new team and so on and so on so i actually don't recommend quitting your job unless it's chronic burnout that is clearly baked into this job um the second thing i do is regular exercise where uh i don't mean just go out and like burn a bunch of energy i mean make it a consistent part of your day every day for me it i ride my bike to and from work and

it makes a huge difference to my personal well-being huh i would ride my bike to work if i were being chased by animals and there was a bike and that was the only way i could escape them but i do exercise and it helps a lot um just in general taking care of myself helps and not taking care of myself exacerbates burnout so if i go home and play video games all night and like cram down several packages of oreos which i can do uh surprise surprise i work less effectively and i'm less focused afterwards i also resort to stupid video games sometimes when i'm feeling burned out and it just makes me feel worse yeah yeah so well what kind of let's dig into this what kind of video games do you play you said they're stupid i only play one and it's league

of legends oh okay yeah that's perfect because it's basically the same as dota and when you win you get this like fake high but then even after you're done and you win you're like i feel like i have accomplished a thing but what is different in my life now oh i have negative one hours and then when you lose your team is all yelling at you and they're fighting with each other and it's just like this cesspit of misery and despair and and um that is not on the list of things that helps with oh it's not okay good i i yeah i was confused about that wallow in it you know what my secret is to avoiding burnout i just dive into it dive into the burnout into the cesspool just luxuriate in the misery so these these video games have you said you get a high from them when you

win but i don't get that what i get is i think oh it's over you need to get better well like no like when i win it's like oh because you know these games are designed to like addict you into leveling up your character and then you're like oh but i didn't get to buy that last item to really max out my my hit my uh attack damage right i always feel like i'm like i gotta play another game because i didn't get to max out my level anyway you know they're designed that way interesting to just make you have these obsessive responses to them um i think dota is designed to make you spend money on its cosmetic items okay and it works it's did you know it's a free game and also the average amount of people of money that people who spend money on it is way more

than what it would cost to buy like a regular expensive video game there you go so with that done we've solved burnout it's solved i think the fact that people talk about burnout so much means it is a tricky problem to solve um and there probably aren't really easy solutions to it And I know that when you were talking about quitting your job and how that's a bad solution to it, it reminded me of this blog post I read by this guy named Jameis Buck, who might be like the first programmer that I learned about and looked up to. He worked at 37signals for a while, and he wrote really openly about burnout. And it cost him his job.

Like 37signals worked very hard to keep him and to make him happy. but in the end he just if you just don't do anything for a long time you can't just sit there and get paid um so he had to quit and then he kind of went on this journey of self-discovery and it was a long process for him to recover from it but it was it was painful and it was hard i'll i'll link that in the show notes because it's a really good read and also did it have a happy ending yeah it had a happy ending he's kind of like found his happy place again he he actually dove into maze generation after he quit his job so that's your uh burnout cure um generate no but it was for him he he ended up writing a book about generating mazes and code

and it became pretty popular and it was just like this cool technical thing that he learned about that he wouldn't really have done without the experience it's it's an interesting read that's cool yeah all right question answered question answered where can people go if they want jinx they go to soft skills.audio there's a new fancy button on our website i haven't even seen it i should go look at it right now but dave i saw the poll request dave made a new thing and ask a question link at the very top yep and by the time this comes out jameson will have read it approved it and merged it yeah oh did i not merge it yet not yet okay well it'll exist it'll be better i don't know what it

is because i haven't looked at it yet it's one but there is a way for you one click now okay cool it's just a link that takes you to the form yes uh and i did some extensive user experience analysis to save you one click it turns out that two clicks is more than one click and we have learned that um you can give us as much as little details you like we can keep you anonymous we can uh give you give us okay ask a question that's really embarrassing and then and then say i want to be known as and then insert your enemy's name there help i keep wetting my pants in the middle of a meeting from steve and then you just like snort and giggle while we read it and talk about steve's pants wetting problem

um okay or ask a serious question we'll answer it if you like this show please share with people we we love getting new listeners new listeners means there's a wider variety of experience in questions and feedback we get on the questions and so we love that cool all right thanks yeah we'll catch you next week