Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 163: Sounding a warning and negative Glassdoor reviews

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently joined a new team to help rewrite a batch job whose source code has long been lost. After taking some time to learn the tech stack and the business problem, I realized that the current approach will not let us meet our nightly deadline. Even a very generous back of the envelope estimate suggests that we’ll miss it by two orders of magnitude. I have some ideas on how to maybe fix this… buuuttt… I brought my concerns and calculations to the lead project engineer who dismissed them outright. They did not offer an explanation for why I was wrong, even when I asked for one. I started a proof of concept to illustrate my point, but there were some weird conversations that suggested that I should just drop the issue. I know how to make a technical argument about my concerns, but apparently that isn’t enough. How can I get fellow engineers to at least take my concerns seriously, not just for this project, but generally? I’m only 3.5 years into my career, so is it just a seniority thing? Hi! I’m a software engineer and I’m currently looking for my next job. It will be my second-ever job, so this means this will be my first time putting the Soft Skill Engineering advice (““quit your job””) in practice. Woo-hoo! Anyway… Browsing the job offerings I often check Glassdoor to see what people are saying about the given company, and I found a lot of negative reviews. I imagine sites like Glassdoor are negatively-biased, but these reviews left me wondering if there is any way I can investigate how good or bad working for the company would be. Maybe through some questions during the interviews? Any idea? By the way, I love the show, keep up the great work!

it takes more than an encyclopedic knowledge of all the slack channels that exist at your company to be a great software engineer this is episode 163 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 answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development give me a minute while i troll through my slack channels to try to find a funny response i I tried to count how many there were at work and I gave up, but I did find out that there are 900, no, 9,453 custom emojis at my work Slack workspace. And have you memorized them?

No, I think I use, now I want an anthropologist to study my Slack usage and Slack custom emoji usage. You might probably use like 20 of them. I don't know. You might have more emojis than I know words. i mean there is a coming future where people don't communicate with words they just communicate with animated gifs of attractive people making faces and that expresses the feeling that you are having at that moment so we have you know we have multi-byte character sets but for that you

would need like you know hundreds of bytes a lot of bytes yeah a lot of bytes to have that that justin timberlake like raising his eyebrow image or whatever anyways that's not what this show's about nope do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons dave yes thank you patrons who have chosen to support us on patreon where they get a shout out every week those people are matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach granin tails the weird orange squirrel thing i guess luis santos nick cantar sean ivo robotnik sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau and chris hogan if you'd like to contribute you can go to softskills.audio and click on the support us on patreon button and if you do you get to join our slack so i want to be clear the joining our

slack is if you contribute any money for any period of time we send you an invite it's not dependent on your continued contributions and there's some cool stuff going on there we've had some interesting discussions lately one of them was about interview processes and what a good interview process should look like another one was about how to do peer reviews when you haven't really worked with the person for very long and it's fun to see people ask questions and there are smart people they're both asking questions and giving their opinions so i've learned something by just being around them so join us yeah we have maybe five slack channels but that number could grow as you join and we have one custom emoji

so far all right let's get into the questions do you want to read our first one dave sure this comes from an anonymous listener who says i recently joined a new team to help rewrite a batch job whose source code has long been lost after taking some time to learn the tech stack and the business problem i realized that the current approach will not let us meet our nightly deadline even a very generous back of the envelope estimate suggests that we'll miss it by two orders of magnitude i have some ideas on how to maybe fix this problem but that's but with three u's and three t's so you know elongated sorry i don't know why i said that maybe maybe they misspelled boot boot has three o's silly oh my mistake i brought my concerns and calculations to the

lead project engineer who dismissed them outright they did not offer an explanation for why i was wrong even when i asked for one i started a proof of concept to illustrate my point but there were some weird conversations that suggested that i should just drop the issue i know how to make a technical argument about my concerns but apparently that isn't enough how can i get fellow engineers to at least take my concerns seriously not just for this project but generally i'm only 3.5 years into my career so is it just a seniority thing hmm there's a lot of stuff in here that's really interesting too yeah the batch process whose source code has long been lost i just have never worked anywhere i actually i'm sure that exists somewhere at my current employer because every

everything exists all at once because it's large enough but i've not worked with a situation like that where somebody wrote it in like cobalt in the 60s or something and how would you even run it yeah see this is my ignorance showing do you like compile it to some binary format and then that thing that artifact just runs while the source code has long disappeared i'm gonna guess they're keeping around like a windows 95 computer just for this patch job to run okay yeah it's like some exe that yeah it's just on there no one no one better bump that computer under the desk no updates don't touch it uh i have a unrelated story about that so a person was getting laid off they told them to clear out their desk they were a security researcher and there was a raspberry

pi plugged into their desk with some blinking lights on it and i think they got a little bit freaked out about it because it's the security person and they're getting fired and maybe they'll be all grumpy and maybe that could do something nefarious so they went to unplug it and some people around the desk were like no you can't unplug that that will that's an essential piece of our build process like just some random raspberry pi somewhere is has become critical infrastructure so and that was not long ago it is amazing how neglected things can become critical infrastructure just on accident i love it yep okay so you don't have any source code for this thing it's this is one thing i'm a little confused about is the batch job is currently running

but now it's got to be rewritten but you think the rewritten version will be too slow yeah are you saying why not just get two windows 95 machines under a desk for high availability and leave it as is that's a great idea get a cluster going oh yeah i mean it makes sense if it's this critical thing that no one can touch or modify or understand or maintain the idea of rewriting it makes sense to me yeah it makes sense to me too is your question how did it get like this what i don't understand your question no my question is it's running now and working so why is it that a rewrite is going to be a hundred times slower that's just i mean maybe it doesn't matter it's a little bit far afield of the actual soft skills question but i

was just confused by that it's got to be architectural things i mean computers have not gotten 100 times slower since windows 95 oh yeah yeah yeah for sure trine is very fast but if it's some batch process it's probably io bound not it's not just crunching numbers like crazy so yeah yeah i don't know yeah i don't know i know that's for our i know our other podcast the reason they don't have the source code is because it was actually written using future technology and compiled to a windows 95 executable in the past using like they okay they got the date wrong they were like this this will probably start running well no that doesn't make sense they didn't get the date wrong they just knew it would last long enough and they needed

to target a long-standing platform. They tried to write 2995, which was the year it was written, but they wrote 1995 instead. So their compiler can take a year and it just spits it out and whatever runs that year. Yeah.

Okay. I'll pretend like that's the reason for my bad technical decisions. You know, I was just really trying to target early 2000s. My finger just slipped on the keyboard. I watched the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. like many humans, and it is fantastic.

It's one of the best pieces of entertainment I've ever watched, and it's also terrifying. But it's really interesting to watch as a technical person because a lot of the episodes are about this intersection between social and political things and technical expertise, where there were so many technical problems that went wrong, and there were lots of opportunities

for people that knew better to express their concerns before the disaster and after the disaster i guess for context chernobyl is a reactor that exploded spectacularly in the 80s in in ukraine and caused a lot of bad things this probably isn't a chernobyl style or scale disaster but there's there's seeds of the same feeling of like someone bringing up questions and just being shut down because of social pressure not technical discussions the question asker didn't describe a detailed technical discussion about the trade-offs and reasons why and and correcting their assumptions it's just like impossible move on yeah and that's a social problem not just a technical problem of you're newer in your career this person

replying to you is probably very senior and experienced and maybe has been there a lot longer and and it's it's hard to just say it's hard to keep pushing after they shut you down yeah so i feel for you i guess that's a summary or this experienced person maybe has a reputation that could be damaged if you call out that their old windows 95 batch job is not a good thing or they lost the source code well not not that maybe they're the ones leading this rewrite and it's this huge effort and if you say hey this has these fundamental problems which will make it not work like two orders of magnitude that's a lot slower uh we'll miss it by two orders of magnitude i wonder what the orders are that means that means in my head that means 100 x basically so like it

will take 100 days instead of one day. Maybe it's worth talking about just batch processes for a little bit to set the context. I assume that by batch process, it means there's this thing that operates nightly on like the previous day's data, and it needs to finish so that the next one can operate on the next day's data. If it takes too long, then it'll kind of start to back up. Does that sound accurate to you? That does. And you know, I just realized it has the word batch in it, which makes me think of Windows 95 batch files, which really just points back to windows 95 as all roads do so yeah that is that is what i understand a batch job to be so so yeah like i mean what if there are there are just so many variables that could be contributing to this

person's behavior personally i find this other person's behavior unacceptable if someone comes to me with a concern and they've thought it through and they present numbers especially like in this case you know that demonstrate that it's going to be a problem and the other person just says, nope, that's not a problem. That's unacceptable. I mean, I get it. You don't want to spend a bunch of time going through a bunch of details, especially if you deal with a lot of these concerns, but you just have to. I don't know. How do you expect your team to grow and learn if you're not willing to say why you think something is unfeasible? I think so much time has been wasted and so much damage has been caused by people being unwilling to challenge assumptions

once it's too late the the project's already in motion maybe there's already a team for it there's a big plan maybe they're part way through it and they're coming up on a deadline and it's like we can't change it now like there's all these all this momentum behind it so we can't even entertain the idea and i don't know that that's gonna make it 100 times faster magically when it's done like you're just kind of kicking the can down the road so i i agree this seems this is not this is not how leaders should behave technical leaders at all it's very simple we can talk about this two orders of magnitude issue after i get my promotion for leading this team then we can deal with it it's fine we'll just make it two orders of magnitude faster

problem solved how many two three how about we just do three orders i mean come on yeah i mean there's there's a couple possibilities one is that your analysis is wrong and you're missing some pretty fundamental assumptions in which case it's it's their job to say here's what you're missing and here's how it's fine and the other possibility is you're right and they're wrong and then it's their job to not just stick their head in the sand and say like yeah everything's fine don't worry moore's law will oh that's still going strong right isn't it about a hunt isn't it about a two orders of magnitude improvement every 18 months oh yeah still perfect maybe we'll move it to like gpus or something or blockchain i'm sure i'm sure we can do like serverless it'll

be great yeah i'm sure we're one buzzword away from resolving this small performance problem exactly yeah so it's unacceptable the way that this leader is behaving but what what would you do as the individual contributor you're still relatively new to the team you're relatively new in your career do you think this is worth going around to your i mean one thing you could do is go around to your co-workers and say here's this issue i'm concerned of and try and drum up support the danger there is you're kind of like the the leader has shown they are not great already and then you're you're kind of like fomenting rebellion against them yeah if they didn't react well to your technical concerns wait till you see what they do when you yeah when you go over their

head to their boss and convince their boss that they're wrong and now on the one hand they might have it coming, but I doubt it. On the other hand, it is very easy to make bad assumptions about performance. And so I would caution the listener in this case to make sure that you have very solid evidence. And typically when it comes to like hypothesizing about how slow or fast something is going to be, it is almost always a waste of time other than speaking in very broad terms. Like this will incur a round trip on the network, this won't. Like great, no problem. you know round trips take 10 milliseconds okay we can we can handle that but if it's like well this algorithm is clearly going to produce faster results over a three-hour job than this one

and and you think you've got some numbers behind it i don't think you you probably don't and i think your your instinct to create a proof of concept is a great idea because yeah that's spot on yeah i like that's what you have to do to be able to measure the results and if it's possible to run a batch job on like non-production data or a replica of production data or something i would personally go build that measure it and then i would bring those results well first i would look at the results and say are these actually problem problematic and if they are then i would bring them and say hey i built a proof of concept that does 85 of what the original version did and here are the results it's 100 times slower um we're not going to make it in the batch window but and then

this is an important part bring a few options for solutions like hey i think if we change it this way or do that or break it up in this way or introduce lambda or some other buzzword suddenly now now you're just saying i'm not just part of the problem i'm here to propose an alternate approach i like that too i the the part that sounds a little sketchy is the question asker says i started a proof of concept to illustrate my point but there were some weird conversations that suggested i should just drop the issue yeah so i wonder if there's kind of like a please stop wasting your time and get your work done yeah like feeling going on yeah i don't know there's, again, this feels just as weird as the other conversation, you know, like something weird

is going on here. There are some variables that you can't see, and it would be great to get to the bottom of those to figure out what's actually going on. Like maybe someone else is working on it, you know, or maybe they see you as the boy who cried wolf, you know, famous metaphor. It's hard to know. Yeah. Hard to know. And I mean, it's possible that you have that reputation as the boy who cried wolf. I don't know any of these details, but if that's the case, that's an even stronger reason for data because then you're the boy who cried check out these results that demonstrate why this is an actual concern it'd be like if the boy who cried wolf had like a wolf pelt or i don't know his arm was bleeding because he had been chomped by a wolf the boy who cried

my arm is gone please help me recover from these wolf wounds i have three options for you tourniquet stitches i i do think there there's some amount of sticking your neck out involved in addressing this problem further and i think you have to decide if you would like to stick your neck out or if you want to put your head down and and say like not my problem i tried and it was shot down both of those are pretty different and have potentially different consequences i would say the stick your neck out thing is easy for me to say when i'm not in your situation and don't have to deal with potential consequences, but it, I think it's potentially higher reward as well. If there is a problem and you demonstrate it and you help get it addressed, that'll prevent

this disaster from happening. But also there's probably some recognition in there for you. Um, I think it could blow up in your face a bit more too, though. Yeah. I think here's what I would do. I think I would, I would try and do it as a skunk works project. If my team leader, whoever said, don't do this, I would, I would try and devote some, some amount of my time to it until i could get some concrete data and i think i would try and find a trusted person on the team who's experienced enough to be able to give good feedback not to say like look we're doomed help me convince my my boss or whatever but just to say hey can you tell me if these numbers look right here's my concern yeah is there anything fishy about this to you or do you think this is worth

pursuing more and get and get another set of eyes because you're relatively new to the team still and so maybe there's something you're missing but i think if you can vet your idea a little bit with someone less less inclined to just dismiss you outright i think that can maybe give you the confidence to raise it again with better data to back it up and if the whole thing blows up in your face you've got a fall guy and i'm just gonna need you to hit enter right here on this keyboard i put in front of you and oh great look whose name is on that diff oh boy hey do you mind cryptographically signing this thing real quick uh it's just some standard boilerplate don't worry about it yeah this is i this is not an environment i would like to work in where you are there

are questions you are not allowed to ask i i think well-meaning questions should be welcomed and and you should always be willing to have a debate and and the answer might be like yeah there are some problems but we're not doomed and and fixing them is hard because of these organizational reasons or whatever like the answer might not be satisfying to you but you should always be able to ask them so yeah i'm glad you asked this and i think you're right to bring it up as a tricky situation because it does seem tricky yeah it does all right should we move on to the next question let's do it this is from a listener named g just the letter g like in sesame street hi i'm a software engineer and i'm currently looking for my next job it will be my second ever job so that means it would be my

first time putting the soft skills engineering advice to quit your job in practice woohoo i don't know how i'm supposed to pronounce that you did you did it oh well yeah that's right there's an implied give you some options and then you pick which one anyway browsing the job offerings i I often check Glassdoor to see what people are saying about the given company. And I found a lot of negative reviews. I imagine sites like Glassdoor are negatively biased, but these reviews left me wondering if there is any way I can investigate how good or bad working for a company would be.

Maybe through some questions during the interview? Any ideas? By the way, I love the show. Keep up the great work. Thank you. Thanks, G. Thank you, G. Congratulations.

I think you should take some time about what's the most dramatic way you could quit your job. like what'll what'll get people talking you know okay what'll leave you with a legend at your previous company i mean can you rent you can rent llamas i know this from college what if you just come in with like a rad outfit on lots of just sparkles all over and like two llamas one on each side later nerds quitting yeah yeah later i think they're too small to ride so it'd be hard to ride out on one they'll be like you got enough of them they could they could like pull a chariot though that'd be cool as all your co-workers sit back and say that is so g that's classic g g and their hijinks all right well with that with that solid valuable advice out of the way

how do you well you know possibilities are endless yeah i'm actually wondering if g actually is just a poorly concealed alias for glass door like this is actually glass door they're saying what do we do about all these negative reviews how do we make people trust our site more yeah well i think there's an answer to what you can do about all the negative reviews in glassdoor which is like pay them money and get them removed oh is that oh yeah is that a thing i don't know i'm assuming it is because i assume the worst of everything okay i you you probably can't there's probably something in their terms of service but guaranteed there are companies that are like make sure you show up and write us a good review on glassdoor yeah to like keep

team spirit higher i have worked for one of those companies i have not maybe i'll tell people to do it in my team and become one of those companies yeah glass door this i mean the the real there's two parts of this one is like how can i find out the truth are these glass door reviews accurate or not and the other question is how do i find out find out if this company would be a good place to work or not and i think the answer is the same for both which is that the best way to find out is by talking to someone who works there who's relatively unbiased and likely to give you real details

instead of someone who's just thinking about that big fat referral bonus. Yeah, it's great. I'm leaving next week, but if you start this week, I'm going to make 3,000 bucks. You know, your first 90 days will be the most incredible period of your life

and you really need to make sure to stick around for every single one of those. Yes. After that, it's all up to you. Because that's how long it takes for me to get my money. That's right. Have you ever read a negative review on Glassdoor for a company you work for? Yeah, I have.

And have you ever been privy to the details behind that review? Yes. And did you find the review to be accurate? I found it to be accurate. I found it to be a good representation of the viewpoint of the person who wrote the review, who was disgruntled for having been laid off. Oh. Which would suck.

I would be very disgruntled if I was laid off too. And I think it was, I think the negative aspects of working there were looming large in their mind because of this negative experience, basically. I see. I also sometimes read negative reviews at companies that I don't like just to enjoy that feeling of, what's the German word? Schadenfreude? Oh, yeah.

Just to luxuriate in it, you know, like, oh, just confirm all my biases. oh yeah that feels so good a bias confirmed as its own it is horrible it is a horrible place to work i mean i i don't feel like they i had not been laid off and i i liked working there still so i feel like there was some amount of uh positive things that were maybe missing from from my experience but also it wasn't my experience because i didn't get laid off so i don't know what is your question like can those be trusted basically well i just i was curious because I've seen a couple of reviews for companies that I've worked for and I and I read them and I thought that review in no way portrays my experience like it is so completely the opposite

of the experience I've had and I realized I think that people have such a different experience at companies based on the based on so much about them individually the expectations they bring their strengths I'm nodding their weakness I should say uh-huh instead of nodding and so these reviews it's like they may or may not apply to you and i think in some cases they will but in others they won't and it's really hard to know the difference between them i think what you're looking for is broad patterns though because so so first of all i 100 agree with you we've talked about this on the show before but i think there's there's this model in sports of talented players moving around and not being successful and suddenly finding the right environment and coach

and team and teammates and play style and scheme and and they just blossom and i think that totally happens in in jobs where there are places where people do not fit well because of all kinds of reasons that aren't necessarily systemic but there are also systemic things sometimes too i uh i think i pay attention to the ceo ratings a little bit because that kind of gives me an overall aggregate feel and then if i'm interviewing at a place i'll sometimes read through about what their interview process is to get a feel of of what it's like and what i should expect but i think we were talking about this before the show and i couldn't find a citation to back it up so the citation is now this podcast i think people are more likely to report there's

this thing that i heard first about radio call-in shows where they would do these surveys of tell us your opinion about this topic or this candidate or whatever and the responses they got were most often negative and i think the reason they proposed was because if you have a negative feeling about this that's more likely to motivate you to act enough to call in and and talk about it on the air than if you just think like ah that politician's okay or like i don't know i think that head coach of the team's doing a fine job that's unlikely to get you off your couch and dial the phone and i think some of that might be in effect where people that are just like yeah my job's okay are not super likely to leave glassdoor ratings yeah so it might be the people who have had the worst

experiences who feel the most negative feelings who have the motivation to sign into glassdoor sign up for the site and find their company and write a review it's also it's also kind of risky to write a negative review for a company because usually you can tell who it is if you well yeah it's a small enough company if you know the context granted and i was just thinking just thinking that because i'm actually looking at a glassdoor review uh set of reviews from a previous company i worked for right now oh and you can tell who it is not exactly but i remember in the past there were more negative reviews than what i see right now so i don't know what happened maybe they maybe they aged out there's there's gotta be some this yeah there's something i mean there's a

banner right in front of me that says your trust is our top concern so companies can't alter or remove reviews i mean that's like those signs on crappy fast food restaurants that said made with 100 real beef and you're like why would i why would you have to say that the fact that you have to say that communicates that there is something that you feel like you have to defend maybe i mean maybe glass door won't remove them but the company can call up the employee and be like yeah hey bob i'm pretty sure that was you can you just remove that or we're gonna sue you yeah anyway glass door has never ever had an incident of making food out of people like insolent that's a big banner on the top of the site you're like uh okay yeah

so i'm i'm now deep into glass door just looking up my uh i'm gonna make a fake some pretty solid i'm gonna make a fake review of your consulting company and pretend to be an employee okay yeah do it do it i'll see if i have the power to strike it down we should i should be clear i have no knowledge about how glass door works and i should probably stop like maligning them as a company Yeah, they're probably fine. They certainly are using 100% real beef, I'll tell you that, in every burger they make. No people mixed in with this hamburger. Anyway, so we kind of got a little off track there.

But I think when it comes to rating a company as a place to work, there are so many more dimensions that other people have that are different in other people that their reviews may not apply to you as much as, like, say, reviewing a cell phone case on Amazon, right? Like, there's only so many expectations. you know you could imagine reading a review on amazon it's like yeah this cell phone case is a terrible load-bearing stud for my home you know like one star and and i think that's kind of how employment arrangements are it's like i have expectations i have different strengths than you i have totally different passions than you i have different work-life balance requirements than you so you just never know and also we're dealing with personalities in some cases right like you may get along great with one person and they may get along really or other people may not

and so you know i think it's just so hard to read into it but so that's why i like your idea of looking for themes like if you see themes of people being maligned or churned out or abused or harassed you know they're great but i i've never never seen that on glass door maybe it's there so yeah i also so i'm i'm looking at i'm sure what you said was great but i wasn't listening at all. I'm just kidding. I was listening, but I was also looking at reviews for companies that I've worked at in the past and they're pretty overwhelmingly positive. So I feel like this is challenging my assumption about people putting more negative stuff on then. This is like the opposite problem where I know of some negative stuff that happened and it has not shown up in

these Glassdoor ratings at all. Well, you know, I personally, I consider it pretty risky to put a negative review on Glassdoor. As a current employee? Current or former. I mean, I just wouldn't that's not a bridge i'd want to burn yeah i could see that so i guess the summary of this is that glassdoor is a data point for salary in working conditions and stuff but by far the best way to get a feel for what it's like is to talk to someone that works there and this is a case where it's it's harder to do that earlier in your career because your network is often smaller and as you work longer you just have worked with more people and it's there's a greater chance that you'll just know someone that works at a company you're interested in and that's where you get what

it's really like and i would encourage you to find someone if there's a company you're interested in working at just ask around on on twitter or see if there's a way that you can talk candidly with someone that works there not necessarily in a recruiting context and and ask them what their day is like and what's good about working there and what's bad and what's frustrating and if there are specific concerns you have about situations you don't like or things you want to make sure don't happen there ask about those the question asker also mentions what to do in an interview and you should absolutely come prepared to an interview with questions about what it will be like to work there. And it's, it's possible that the answers you get won't be, I don't think people

oftentimes tend to lie in them, but it's, it's a short period of time. It's not, it's hard to, it's hard to give the dirt and you are kind of selling a candidate at that point. But people ask that when I interview them for, for my current employer. And I try and tell them like, here's what it's like, here's the strengths and weaknesses of the culture and the, and the space we're in. And part of my goal is to identify whether they would be happy too, because I don't want someone who would qualify and pass the interview process and just be miserable with the culture. That's not going to be successful either. So I think the summary of my ramble is you should come up with questions that help you, that you can ask in the interview process to evaluate what it will be

like working there. Would you ever like bring a negative Glassdoor review in and say, Hey, could you respond to this? Ooh, not as a new person. I mean, I think I would do that if I interview process I mean no I mean I think I I would do that well no the answer is no but I would especially not do it if I were new in the industry where I didn't feel like I had a lot of leverage maybe maybe if I felt like they just really wanted me and I had a really strong concern I would do that but that feels like you're kind of trying to play a game of gotcha with them I guess I think you could do it in a less confrontational way and and maybe say like like I have you know I have some concerns and i think it'd be yeah i think it'd be okay to say like i was looking on glass

door and i saw this kind of thing in a review can you can you is that how things work here or can you talk about those but printing it out and bringing it in feels like you're like serving them a warrant or something like gotcha sucker someone hated you on the internet and yeah that feels weird but again that's that's assuming that data on glass door yeah looks good and is reflective of reality all right there you go yeah find someone that you know that works there and oh man i didn't talk too much about specific questions but i think you should ask about finances what they're like at the company as a whole i think you should ask about leadership and management and what their attitudes are and what they value and i definitely think you should

ask why is this position open because you want to know if someone got fired and you want to know why and like and and ask about i don't know performance issues and and kind of landmines and problems on the team i think those are all fair game to ask about and they should have compelling answers about them and also bring a polygraph machine and bring a polygraph machine no that's what the handshake at the end how sweaty is their hand you just shake their hand is it a firm grip do they make a little raspberry pie up your sleeve with a moisture sensor and a pulse sensor so you can measure them and if you're ready to just bail out of the interview it's got one of those like zap buttons that show up in cartoons do those exist in real life where you shake someone's hand and

it buzzes yeah they have mechanical ones that are like they just kind of tickle you oh wait mechanic does it like stab you it like what would the mechanic what would the mechanism do they look like a drill what is this a are you drilling a hole in someone's hand and in cartoons it gets translated to like oh what a wacky prank no i'm not even gonna explain it to you okay okay i prefer keeping my understanding of it yeah basically like that okay all right well have we answered the question yeah i think so good luck okay good luck congratulations on your future second job exciting time what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click ask a question we will read it we will

answer it and we will catch you next week see ya you