Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 157: How to deal with a consistent low performer and my architect wants me to switch from Ruby to Java

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

This episode is sponsored by the O’Reilly Velocity conference. Register today and use discount code SKILLS for a 20% discount: http://velocityconf.com/skills. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I became a manager a year go. I took over someone as my direct report who was not performing well at the time. On my first day, I gave a motivational chat to welcome him again to the team and continued to motivate him. But after 1 year, he is not improving at all. I give him clear feedback and set expectations but he just doesn’t change. This got to a point where it is stressful for both of us. And since I spent so much time on just for this issue, I fear that it adds to the stress and may affect my decisions. What should I do? I’ve just join the company as a Ruby/RoR developer. After half a year the architect presented new way of developing the product and said that from now all new features will be writen in Java/Spring Boot and we switch to micriservice architecture. But I don’t like Java, don’t want to switch (I have 6 year expirience with Ruby), what should I do?

This episode is sponsored by the amazing O'Reilly Velocity Conference coming to San Jose, California, June 10th through June 13th. It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is episode 157 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all of the non-technical things that go along with the technical field of software development.

And we reuse our tagline because Jameson can't think of an intro. All right. Hey, you can't be brilliant every week, Jameson. Yeah, this is, anyways, I'm on vacation. I'm, I'm, that's all I can handle about computers right now. It's just regurgitating old stuff. Which is why I had to write your script this week. Yeah. You really punched it up for me. I'd like to thank the people on Patreon, our great patrons who are contributing at the level where they get a shout out every week on the show. Thank you to Matthew Voidovich, the Agile Ventures Charity, Zach Grannon, Luis Santos, Nick Kantar, Sean Clayton, Ivo Robotnik,

Sonny Tai, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mireille Rousseau, and Chris Hogan. Sorry, Chris, almost forgot you there. If you'd like to support the show, you can go to our website, softskills.audio, and click support us on Patreon. Thank you so much to those who do. Yeah, thank you very much. I think we should just dive into the questions. Let's do it. All right. This is from an anonymous listener. I became a manager one year ago. I took over someone as my direct report who was not performing well at the time. On my first day, I gave a motivational chat to welcome him again to the team and continued to motivate him. But after one year,

he is not improving at all. I gave him clear feedback and set expectations, but he just doesn't change. This got to the point where it is stressful for both of us. And since I spend so much time on just that issue, I fear it adds to the stress and may affect my decisions. What should I do? Sounds like your motivational talk didn't do the job. Yeah, I guess not. Maybe it would have taken two motivational chats. Oh, did you think of that? Yeah, you had to do it on the first day and then another one on the second day just to have it really stick. It's two-factor motivation. Yeah, this is a tough situation to be in. I'm sorry that you're in it. I feel like the good news is it seems like broadly you are doing the right things where I think a manager

should be setting expectations for performance and letting people know how they're performing relative to those expectations and the question asker says I gave him clear feedback and set expectations so it seems like you're you're the worst way this can go is someone is just doing a bad job and they don't know and no one tells them or they they decline to accept your feedback when you do tell them yeah or that but actually actually no i think what you're saying is even worse because it's like they're just kind of not performing everyone knows it except them and then if you were to approach them about it it would be like they got blindsided and that's the worst yeah i read this book called radical candor and there's a story at the beginning about

that situation you just described where someone joins a team they aren't performing very well everyone kind of just sidesteps the issue and then eventually this person gets fired and in the conversation they say why didn't anyone tell me they're so distraught partially because getting fired sucks but partially because to them it was a huge surprise and it should never be a surprise i guess this is a hint that we've talked about firing people yeah where we're going with this yeah i mean assuming that this is true that you've given him clear feedback set expectations you've given him a year and this has happened repeatedly and and consistently not just once i feel like that's the direction this is headed that you need to let this person go because

they're not being successful in this job and and you even mentioned it's stressful for both of us right like it it does not feel good to feel like you're failing consistently and it's not going to be great but you could at least look at it as part of the effect of firing them will be they will get to find a position that they're a better fit for yeah because this isn't it and this is a bummer of a topic but i think it's worth talking about because it does happen unfortunately it really is but i'm just i'm so glad to see that you've been that the listener here has been doing all the right things along the way because i think when you know if it comes to having to move this person out which it sounds like it's going to at least you won't have the dreaded question how come no

one told me yeah i mean there's there's no way to make a firing good like there's no there's no non-painful way to fire someone right it's it's not like they're going to be like oh thank goodness Yeah. But at least you won't have that lingering question. You know, you can know that you did your diligence. You gave them every opportunity and you gave them a pretty generous amount of time to recover. A year is pretty good. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine looking ahead another year and saying, well, I've now given this individual two years to improve with, let's say, quarterly feedback saying they weren't meeting expectations. I mean, that actually feels even worse than having to move them out now to me. Yeah, there's an effect on the rest of the team, too. I mean, the team might have to cover for for this guy by fixing his mistakes or by picking up his slack or I mean, there's a balance because you don't want to make this ruthless, like cutthroat atmosphere that doesn't feel safe. But also it would feel like if I'm an employee on the team, it's not my job to fire this person. So, but I'm suffering for it because the quality of life at work is worse because they're not doing a good enough job.

Yeah, I've definitely been there. And that's like, that actually raises an interesting point. So when you're preparing to do a termination like this, which I've only done, I've done a couple. Jameson's done, have you done, have you done this before? We've talked about this, right? Yeah, I've done, depends on how you count, like one to three, I guess. Yeah.

Okay. Thankfully, not dozens or hundreds. So between one and three. Yeah. It's like a Schrodinger's termination. Yep. We'll call it one and a half. Okay.

Wait, no, the math is wrong. Two. So I think that there's a couple of general rules or a couple of good ideas you can use here to make this a little bit less painful. One really cool technique that I saw for someone that needed to be let go, But, you know, you want to try to give them as soft a landing as possible and help them not have a bad reputation with the teammates that they're leaving behind.

And so what I saw offered to someone, which I thought was great, was it said, look, we've decided that we're no longer a fit and we're going to give you three months. And here's how it's going to work. You can either resign today and take three months severance or you can take the next three months to continue working with us and do a job search. And so now, you know, you can leave on your own terms, either by taking the cash and going now, the possible reputational damage, and I'll do my best to construct a narrative that supports you and is positive. Or you can take the next three months and find a job, and you know that you have now the time you need to make that happen. And I thought that was a really generous way to do it, to help a person make the transition. Hmm. That's weird. Is it? I thought it was great. I think it's weird. You're just going to pay them to do... So severance is one thing.

They continue to do the job, right? I mean, they're still employed. But they can't do the job already when they're trying. And now you're telling them, hey, just go look for a job while we pay you and you still come in. Think of it like a contractor where the contract is ending in three months. Like we expect you to finish the work you're on and we expect you to make the most of the next three months. But if you quit in six weeks because you found a job, that's fine. And when I saw this offered to someone, they took the three-month option.

Stay employed for three months. they found a job after a month or two and left and that way they got to leave on their own terms management didn't have to like sit down with the rest of the team and say so and so has been fired because of bad performance and they seemed to i mean i'm not going to say they were happy with the arrangement but at least at least they had some choice huh that's weird to me i mean severance is is a pretty standard thing uh at i think at a certain size of company i don't know that it happens at little tiny startups or anything but that seems pretty standard and that does kind of as much as possible, humanize it a little bit. There's often like things you sign to go along

with severance, like non-disparagement agreements or something like that to try and protect the company in order to qualify for the severance. But I still feel like overall giving people, if you're going to let them go, giving people a little bit of a bridge is reasonable and healthy. But you would prefer a financial bridge, not a time bridge is what you're saying. I don't think so. I think if you're saying you are not doing a good enough job to work here, But stay around and be even more distracted because now, you know, and you're going to be looking for another job that feels worse to me. Maybe it would depend heavily on the candidate because I could see some people approaching that differently than others and some people getting maybe kind of toxic. And I think I think for some people, they really like if they really care about their reputation and they just don't want the story being told that they were an underperformer and had to be fired.

this is a good option for them right if they value that more than they value getting a three month lump sum of pay yeah i i want to focus in on that underperformer thing i think there's this stigma around getting fired where it's it's like a black spot of who you are as a person yeah and i don't think that's true i think everyone is an underperformer sometimes that's true and have i been fired i got fired for my first job when i was 15 that doesn't count in this context though because they were weird oh sure i think i talked about this on the show no they they hired me and then right before i was about to turn 16 they called me in and said oh sorry we thought you were 16 already and you have to be 16 to work here and then they fired me it was weird so you

had already been working there for a while yeah i had worked there for a while i haven't been fired from a full-time job as a developer but i did do a bad job for a while i had one job and then ended up quitting and and i think if i had stayed long enough i probably would have gotten fired from that job. But I don't think that means I cannot do good work anymore or there's something inherent in my character or abilities. It was a combination of environments and, I don't know, some stuff going on in my life at the time. And it was a bunch of different things together that contributed to it. And so what is the point of this ramble? It's not something intrinsic in you, right? Yeah, it's not. It's not this intrinsic failure in who I am as a human being. And I think I can

understand why people are very ashamed of it and i i don't love that this happened but i also don't think that i don't know some some way of lessening the blow to your reputation or ego of getting fired i i know people have been fired who are great who i'd love to work with and i've told you my sometimes it's their fault and sometimes it's not you got fired yeah i told you my story about getting fired right oh yeah but you should tell it again i was a software tester and i was youthful and stupid as opposed to now now i'm old and stupid and i made some negative comments about my employer in an online forum and this was like before i think that our collective consciousness had acknowledged the fact that everything we put online is like public for

everyone to see yeah for basically forever you're like they'll never know who skater dave 420 is exactly so i said something negative and then literally the next day at work i got a phone call from the owner of the product that I disparaged online just berating me for what I had done. And then, you know, he said, who's your manager? And I told him and he contacted my manager and then I got a call from my manager and she was like, well, Dave,

the only thing she said was, you should probably hope for the best and prepare for the worst. All right. And then about two weeks later, the HR guy called me into his office and said, we've decided that our company and you are not a good fit. And that was it.

And they walked me out the door at that moment. That was a valuable lesson for me, very valuable. And I am so glad I had that experience when I was young and carefree and stupid instead of old and burdened by care and stupid. Yeah. That's the best time to get fired when you don't have a mortgage. Yep. Yeah. So there you go. So, I mean, I know a lot of people who have been fired and only a few of them are terrible people. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. None of them are terrible people. I think your comment about like, it's a confluence of circumstances where it's like, maybe they're in the wrong role for their expertise or for their desires at the time or for their circumstance. You know, like it's a huge, it's so many factors

that go into it. And it's just a matter of time that they find the right role that aligns well with their circumstances and needs. I think the point of me going on this tangent was to part of your proposal of giving them this three month period was it'll preserve the reputation. And I guess this was, I recognize that the reputation hit exists and is real, but I kind of wish it didn't in some ways that it was more okay to say like, yeah, this, I, I had this job and it wasn't great and I didn't do good work and I got fired and I can still do good work. Yeah, that, that would be nice.

That would be really nice. If you follow sports, you see this all the time where there, there are people that bounce around teams for a while and then they end up in the right place for them and become superstars. and your environment has a huge effect and it's not just whether it's good or bad it's a lot of different things about who's around you and what kind of work you're doing and what role you're in but there's a lot of context to performance it's not an absolute i feel like that gets lost into like you got fired you are bad feeling that people have anyways that's not the question that was

asked what should what should the question asker do well they do there is another option here what is it you could tell this person they're doing great give them a huge raise and then let imposter syndrome take over and they'll be gone in weeks okay promote them yes to where they can do less damage oh yeah put them in a management put them in a management role somewhere middle management yeah wait a minute that's where i am oh how did you get there jameson well yeah maybe i just screwed up one too many deploys and they're like don't let this guy deploy anymore put him in meetings i mean okay so assuming that you have tried your best you've given clear feedback over a long period of time about how they're not meeting

expectations and their performance hasn't improved what do you do now now you need i mean just like you inherited this person you need to find some other manager to take this person on transfer them to another team i did just say that in sports sometimes people do better on other teams yeah there you go i mean there's some merit in that potentially if you do think that they have the potential to do good work but they're in the wrong fit you could explore that with them if it really is a talent and ability gap i don't know that dumping them on someone else like you're a used car salesman filling the engine with sawdust so it like putters along another few miles through the test drive. I don't know that that feels great. Like you coach them really well on interview

questions and then have an interview with the other team. Listen, if all you want to do is detect cycles in a linked list, this is your guy. I mean, there is a chance though, that there are roles in your company that are better suited for this person's skills and desires. And maybe you should explore those. There is a chance. I just feel like that sounds like too easy of an answer and you you're probably going to end up needing to fire this guy okay i'm assuming that you have organizational backing and power to make this decision because if if it's an environment where it's very difficult to fire people then i mean we get we get lots of questions from europe and all i know about that is it's really hard to fire people in europe for anything

besides like doing illegal stuff you can't get rid of someone for bad performance basically is what my space lawyer knowledge is telling me. Right. But let's pretend like that's not the case because that's hard. Okay. I don't know what to do there. Yeah, how do you go about it?

Well, I think, I mean, you got to go through all the, there's probably a process for your company on how to do this. And then I think you need, there's two basic crucial conversations here that need to happen. One is with the individual who is being moved out. And that I think, you know,

you might be tempted to lay out your case and try to convince them why it's the right thing to let them go. This is not the time for that. I think the best way to handle these things is to be as compassionate as possible and as generous as possible with your arrangement, but as brief as possible in the moment. It'll be an emotional time. It's not the time for them to take constructive feedback. It's not the time to have a good discussion or a negotiation, like this is over, right?

And you need to end it quickly, compassionately, and don't dwell on it. That's the first conversation that needs to happen, and that's how I handle it and how I recommend handling it. The second conversation is now you need to construct a, a true, but compassionate narrative for the rest of the team. So, you know, and this will depend on what's important to the person who's being moved out. You know, we want to make sure that the rest of the team, if it's important to them, that they preserve a reputation. And like you said, Jameson, I don't like that this is a stigma, but it is, and dealing with the constraints of reality, you have to make it so that the team, that the person's wishes are preserved with the team somehow. And sometimes

that's as simple as saying they've decided to pursue other opportunities, you know, just like that. Yeah. You know, if you've been in management, you'll, you'll hear these, these soundbites sometimes. Yeah. And you'll be like, oh, that's code for it for an underperforming termination. But you'd be surprised. A lot of people will just take it at face value and be like, yeah, okay, cool. Yeah. What do you think about giving some explicit warning ahead of time? So there's, there's a difference between having performance conversations and saying, hey, if this does not change, we will have to let you go. Do you think that's worth doing before the final act of letting someone go. Yeah, I really like that. And I think if you do that correctly, a lot of times people

will leave on their own and none of this will have to come to pass. You won't have to have the hard conversation of an actual termination. You won't have to go through the formality in the process. And the narrative to the rest of the team can simply be they decided to take another job. Yeah, I think the principle of it shouldn't be a surprise is great. And there are all those side benefits you mentioned about it's just easier to deal with if they do it on their own. yeah i think they should know i think you owe it to them even if it is a hard conversation to have it's it's much harder to have if they have no idea it's coming oh yeah so yeah i feel like that's step zero and then step one is like you said be be kind of brief and professional what

about the effect it might have on the rest of the team not just their reputation with the team but how the team feels yeah like a yeah like a foreboding of am i next yeah yeah because i've seen that every time people have been fired around me. You can't just take someone out of the team that has worked there for a while and have people think like, it's probably fine and nothing will change. And even if it does change, you know, change is good. It'll probably be for the better. Right. No, that literally never happens. Yeah. You know, I had a CTO once after they had to move someone out of the organization and he stood up and said, look, I know some of you might be thinking, am I in trouble? Am I underperforming? And let me just tell you that

unless we've been very clear with you and said you're underperforming you're doing fine and you're not next and and i thought you know what that was actually really good of him to explicitly just make it completely unmistakable yep yeah i like that a lot i probably depends a lot on the team and how you do it but i do think some amount of reassuring the team hey this is a change that's been happening for a long time we were very deliberate about this this isn't this isn't a sign of things to come it's this is something we did to make the team better and that we've been talking about for a long time something that makes it feel less sudden because it probably is going to feel sudden to them i've found that people are kind of aware of performance issues but even if

they're aware they don't have an internal timer counting down to when this person is going to get fired yeah i am the opposite like i am so paranoid about getting fired i wake up every day thinking is this going to be the day they finally fire me are you serious i am i don't know why yeah like i oh man i don't know why it is but that's how i wake up like every day like today's gonna be the day this all ends so i've had that before but it was at the story i told where i ended up quitting because i was doing a bad job like it was for a reason because i wasn't wasn't doing very good work i don't think i've ever had that where i felt like i've been trying and working effectively though yeah like i went into my performance review last month and they were like you're

doing great and I was like oh my gosh that's such a relief I just seriously I thought it was I thought it was I don't know I just I don't know why I guess I'm kind of a harsh grader on myself yeah well I give you an F at your ability to grade yourself that's so meta oh my gosh there's one other thing I want to talk about which is this weird at least the way I like to manage a team is very supportive and collaborative and helpful and and i'm focusing a lot on solving people solving problems for people helping them solve their own problems growing and there's this weird change it's like this inflection point where you move from i am helping this person work through this to i cannot help anymore and now i have to

get them out and i don't have any advice for that i just want to acknowledge that that feels weird especially if you're the kind of person that cares a lot about your team this is why it's easier if you're a sociopath, right? Like you just use people like objects and then say, this object has lost its value. The screws are stripped on this thing and I'll throw it away and get a new one. But it is a weird feeling. The question asker talks about coaching this person and motivating him and trying to work with him. And it's, it's weird to say like, you know, I just, I'm not going to, I don't know how you approach that. You just don't do it anymore and cut them off or you still coach them and just know like, yep, but it's not going to work. I don't know. That's the thing I

haven't gotten good at, which is maybe, maybe means I haven't done enough firing to develop that callous yet. You haven't gotten good at being a sociopath yet, but there's still time. There is still time. I mean, look, the life of a sociopath is so easy. You spend all your life murdering people and then you go to jail and you get free meals for the rest of your life. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think there's a point there. I just wanted to acknowledge it. It's hard. All right. Let me just say that this whole conversation has been a real bummer and I'm ready to move on to the next question. All right. Yeah. Let's crack some witty jokes about trivial things. Let's get back on brand. Yeah. You know, I've been thinking about

which conferences to attend this year. What a coincidence. This episode is sponsored by the O'Reilly Velocity Conference in San Jose, California, June 10th through the 13th. Yeah, I checked it out. Velocity looks like a great event to learn new skills for building and managing cloud-native systems. They have a diverse lineup of 92 speakers from companies like Spotify, Netflix, Google, Dropbox, and Cloudflare. There will be talks about cloud application development, microservices, security, and of course, the darling of the internet right now, Kubernetes. It looks incredible this year. You should come to Velocity if you want to learn about chaos engineering, cloud-native systems, and serverless, and you get to hear firsthand from

the engineers who have built some of the world's largest scale and highest performing internet applications. My team works in this domain, and it actually looks directly relevant to the kind of stuff we're facing right now. Really cool. You can even become a certified Kubernetes application developer while there. And you get to meet a bunch of interesting people, which is one of the main reasons I attend conferences. We worked out a sweet deal with the Velocity organizers for soft skills engineering listeners. You can get 20% off when you use code SKILLS during registration. I did the math, and with that code, you can get a pass for as low as $908 right now. Go to velocityconf.com slash skills to register and

use discount code skills all right i'll read this one okay yep you're a sociopath what do you care if i read this question i'm just happily planning your doom listening to you read okay if i say one word wrong it'll be my last yep okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says i've just joined the company as a ruby and ruby on rails developer after half a year the architect presents it a new way of developing the product and said that from now on all new features will be written in java and spring and we switch we'll be switching to a microservice architecture but i don't like java and i don't want to switch i have six years of experience with ruby what should i do it's time to go back to the old soft skills engineering staples quit your job quit your job quit your job

quit your job quit your job the aria yeah hmm question answer all right i feel like you have more nuance to add here dave yes were you just blown away by my powerful arguments i was just thinking yeah like you made such a compelling case yeah you can argue with facts but you can't argue with the feeling you had when i'm saying to you that's unmistakable yeah how are you going to debate that oh man i'm gonna try that in my next technical argument to start singing i'll just sing about like css and js or something like that

i know you hate it but the feeling listen to your heart as i sing the following verse Open curly bracket is. All right. Yeah. What do you think? You've been doing Ruby on Rails for six years straight. I think this is a gift. I do.

I think that after six years, it would be beneficial to your career, probably, to expand your breadth of experience and put some Java on your resume and actually give this technology a good faith try and really come to appreciate the pros and cons of this technology. And you just might learn that there are some things in Ruby that are not that great. And this from someone who has made a career out of poking fun at Java, but who is currently employed full-time writing Java. Yeah, the turntables have turned.

I mean, Ruby was originally, not originally, but part of the Ruby hype when it was growing rapidly, I remember, was it was the anti-Java. Java was the enemy and Ruby was there to destroy it and restore developer happiness. and you kind of get a you get to see whether it's true or not right like is it really that bad yeah you always hear about how learning new languages or technologies helps people appreciate and and carry skills across to their preferred stack so maybe there's stuff you can learn from java that you can bring to ruby maybe you can write an enterprise dependency injection annotation

framework and bring that back to ruby oh wait you don't need it in ruby you just pass stuff into methods yeah i don't want to switch what should i do i really like writing react on the client in in browsers and i took a job where most of my client code is in angular and i had never done a lot of angular before this and it's a little different because no one foisted this upon me i went into it knowing that was the case but i had kind of heard people complain about angular and how much better they like to react but i didn't feel it because i didn't have experience in angular and i feel it so deeply now oh man i feel like it makes me appreciate things about react that i did not appreciate before when it didn't have as much contrast to other tools i did

a lot of backbone before and then moved straight from backbone to react so you're saying that you're saying that you should suffer just so you can appreciate the good i can sing more powerfully about react now there's greater pathos or gravitas in my in my in my verses because you're a tortured soul yeah exactly and everyone knows pain produces art so i'm a better artist now i yeah so i guess i'm kind of agreeing with you i'll rewind and reverse sing my aria about quitting your job I was already convinced well now I'm convinced did we switch I don't know I think it is fair to make if you very strongly prefer to work in a technology I think it's perfectly fine to prefer to find jobs where you get to work with that but I do think there is value in being a little more

flexible so I think what I would actually do is dip some toes in start putting out some feelers not rage quit immediately because they dared to change the tech stack but I think I would look around a little bit while also still trying to dive in and get a feel for what it is like to program in that environment i would encourage you to look back over the past six years and think of all the growth that you've experienced and probably after six years on ruby you've plateaued like it's unlikely that you're making leaps and bounds in your professional ability anymore after six years in the same stack and now think i would say look ahead to the next six years and say if i did six more years of ruby now i'd be looking back over 12 years working in the same tech stack now i think

you actually have a problem on your hand now you might not be employable anywhere but ruby and do you really think that rails is going to have that long of a tenure where it's in demand you know i don't think so most technologies just don't last that long even the really good ones yeah i think i mean the i guess we want to talk about specific tech the hype has moved down from rails but there's still a very very long long tail of valuable work being done in it but i think your point is important that part of being a developer is growing and learning new technologies and if you can show you can do that even if you don't become a java spring developer as your next career just being able to work productively in that will benefit you what about so i have a

friend who likes to specialize a lot and cares very strongly about what he specializes in and he wants to he wants to focus in order to develop deep expertise in something and so going a little bit wider and broader is painful to him because it it makes it harder to develop deep focused knowledge he just struggles with switching to new technologies because he he really wants to focus on the one that he loves and develop deeper and deeper expertise in it and so this i i like being a jack-of-all-trades and learning a lot of different things but that does come with the trade-off of there's there's deep knowledge that i don't develop because i don't get as far into one specific technology as a dedicated expert to it. So I guess I'm saying maybe quit your job

still. Depending on what you want. Yeah. You know, do what you want, depending on what you want. I think that's my summary, my strong position. Okay. And very concrete. I appreciate that. Yeah. I think I agree with you. I wouldn't quit right away. I think I would learn what I could for a little bit and see if I just absolutely hate it. The other thing is there's cultures that come with languages and maybe the question asker really likes the ruby culture and there's certainly a java culture and it's very different from the ruby one and so separate from the technical issues are just what what do you want it to feel like when you work with the language so you can if you just hate that if it's like nails on a chalkboard to you i don't know that

learning more about spring is going to make you suddenly go you know xml it's all right i can say there's not that much xml these days okay i don't know anything about spring and i haven't written java since college so yeah i just can't i mean i can understand wanting to be super deep in one domain i just don't know how much deeper you're going to get after six years in ruby you know like unless you're like a core contributor to the ruby language or to rails or maybe you maintain a significant rails module or something or plugin i just don't know how much deeper you're going to go so that's why i said he's probably plateaued you're swimming you've reached the bottom of the pool you have to actually dig the pool deeper now that's what you're saying

claw through the concrete okay well i think we're we're vaguely in agreement where give it a try it sounds like you're leaning a little bit more towards a little longer try and i'm saying maybe not that long but still try it out and then maybe quit your job yeah yeah give it a fair shake i say and i and i think i would i would give it a year i really do man a year is like some people's normal tenure at a job dave fair point take your normal tenure at a job divide by two and that's how long i would give it okay and if that comes except cap it at one year okay if you're a lifer with the gold watch don't spend your second lifetime writing java yeah okay all right cool have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck what can people do if they want

their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click on ask a question all right thank you for listening we will talk to you next week