Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 164: Fear of firing and disengaged teammates

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello, First of all, I love the show, thank you so much for the amazing work! I always think I’m going to be fired. I’m an extremely anxious person so I feel the need for constant feedback and for someone to tell me everything is alright. Minor problems send me into absolute despair. How can I deal with such anxiety? I frequently ask my manager during 1x1s if everything is alright and how I’m performing and he almost always says things are going well. In our 6-month performance reviews I get more detailed feedback on what I’m doing well and what I can improve. This makes me feel less anxious because I know exactly what my boss is thinking. Even if something has to be improved, at least I know it. Are there any indicators I can use to tell if I’m about to be fired or if my manager is happy with my work? I’ve told my manager about my anxiety and that I’d like constant feedback. That has helped, but I was hoping to get more detailed feedback. Preferably this feedback would make me able to tell, in a scale from 0 to 100, how well I’m performing. Thank you very much! Hey Dave and Jamison, love the show your insight. I have been having a problem on my team that I hope you can help with. We are a team of engineers that have internal customers. It’s a bit of a back end of the back end role. The problem is NONE of the other engineers are customer focused. They don’t engage with the real needs of our customer teams. Tickets come in, they do what’s in the ticket as it reads exactly and we end up with requirements getting lost, tickets needing to be reopened and our reputation going down the tubes. I have taken it on myself to engage with the customer and help them out. BUT, now I have become a glorified customer service rep and I can’t do much of my own work because I’m passing messages back and forth between engineers who don’t like to talk to their customers. My manager says the team needs training and he is going to work on it with them, but this has been going on for months. Should I take the Soft Skills advice of ‘Quit your Job’, or continue being a middleman?”

it takes more than great deployment babysitting skills to be a great engineer this is episode 164 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for software developers about non-technical topics and babysitting the deployment i'm trying to think of what i babysitted once or twice and i was a neglectful babysitter i like put on a movie for myself and was like hey don't die children did you lock them in a room first no i didn't but i should have and i'm trying to think of what that would translate to and deploy babysitting probably have my actual deployment babysitting strategy which is like browse some twitter check back every once in a while see if

the sights down yep oh what do you know it is huh huh well well uh it's five o'clock okay i have our wonderful patrons here i would like to thank thank you to all these folks who are donating at the level where we shut them out every episode thank you to matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity zach grannon tails the weird orange the weird orange squirrel thing i guests louise santos nick cantar sean iva robotnik sunny tie sonic the hedgehog marie rousseau and chris hogan thank you so much to all of those people and everyone else who has donated you help make the show possible you pay for editing for hosting and for all the expenses that go into it and if you donate on patreon any amount for any period of time you get invited to our soft

skills engineering slack team which is great it's really good there's some good conversations going on there it's so fun i liked the one that was about shifting from development to product i think that was cool there's another one about mentoring people and finding out they're underpaid and how do you handle that delicate advocacy situation so it's it's a great place to chat about these kind of things yeah super good all right do you want to read our first question dave sure thing this comes from a listener named anonymous so i don't know if i should read this in a squeaky mouse voice maybe a mickey mouse voice i want to hear you do the rest of the podcast in a mickey mouse voice i want to hear you make your deep good points like well i think

you should talk to a manager i actually do do a pretty good mickey but you're not going to hear it today sorry okay i'm unrehearsed i am not to that level on patreon yet okay oh man oh we could set goals like that wait a minute yeah that's that's like the kickstarter stretch goals yes once we hit a million dollars an episode in dave's squeaky mickey mouse voice totally worth the money then i could tell my kids no no this is actually a good mickey mouse it was worth a million bucks i'm a professional mickey mouse impersonator dad you're terrible i'm like the money says otherwise kids yeah all right on to the question from anonymous hello first of all i love the show

thank you so much for the amazing work you're welcome anonymous i okay the question continues i always think i'm going to be fired i'm an extremely anxious person so i feel the need for constant feedback and for someone to tell me everything is all right. Minor problems send me into absolute despair. How can I deal with such anxiety? I frequently ask my manager during one-on-ones if everything is all right and how I'm performing. And he almost always says things are going well. In our six-month performance reviews, I get more detailed feedback on what I'm doing well and what I can improve. This makes me feel less anxious because I know exactly what my boss is thinking. Even if something has to be improved, at least I know it. Are there any

indicators I can use to tell if I'm about to be fired or if my manager is happy with my work? I've told my manager about my anxiety and that I'd like constant feedback. That has helped, but I was hoping to get more detailed feedback. Preferably, this feedback would make me able to tell, in a scale from 0 to 100, how well I'm performing. Thank you very much. Boy, that's just the dream, isn't it? If you just know from 0 to 100, I feel like that's the dream of a lot of managers, too,

is they want a number that shows goodness of performance. Makes it so much easier to stack rank and then fire the people at the bottom. It does, yeah. Yeah. Oh boy. We got a 29 here and a 28. Guess you're gone, 28. Sorry, 28. Yeah. That's a very fuzzy... Knowledge work is fuzzy and the output is fuzzy. So it's hard to assign numbers to it. People have been trying for a long time and it turns out all those numbers suck. Not only do they suck, but they usually are actively harmful. Like in the 28 versus 29 case.

Yeah. Yeah. I think my first instinct was to say, it sounds like you need to get fired once to see what it takes yeah because then you'll know yeah it's like there's kind of a thing with riding motorcycles where there is some limit which you can ride to at which your traction will fail your bike will slip out and and usually that will kill you if you're going fast enough for that to happen so like you you stay pretty far away but you don't know how far away you are necessarily because you haven't done it before and once you do it if you live then you know like okay i can go that fast and turn that sharp without my tires slipping out so i think you need to apply the same thing you need to start taking casual friday to the extreme there's i'll leave the rest of that

to your imagination i guess what else could you do there's a there's an enormous list yeah take take basically any of our advice from previous episodes and try and apply it that might get you fired you'll find the point pretty quick yeah i guess we didn't read this in the question but that was one of the details that this person has never been fired and that was kind of tongue in cheek but i think there might be something there that like if it's never happened you you don't know how close you are to that line and yeah if you have had a period of really really bad performance or or things that would cause you to get fired i think it's probably easier to know after that like yeah i'm not doing i'm pretty far away from that so i might be safe i really like

that but it's bad advice well no i mean like most of it like i like the idea of having had the experience of having been fired in the past but i obviously i don't like the idea of going through it just to get calibrated yeah and and there's all kinds of other factors that are not necessarily your performance that can lead to someone getting fired oh yeah for sure i think this question asker is mostly worried about the performance aspect like if if the finance team showed up and said all right we're laying all of you off i think it would be like oh well okay i mean i think we all know that can happen anytime. There's basically no indicators. Why don't the engineers ever go to the finance team and say, hey, we're laying all of you off? We decided money isn't important

and only code matters. And you haven't written any of it. Well, if you don't have a finance team, they can't lay you off. Yeah, it's true. And I think the next step is wild success. Of course. Another idea is you could just ask your boss every month in your one-on-ones, hey am i on track to be fired next month and then get it in writing it's like calling shotgun there's everyone has to respect shotgun and there's no way your boss can fire you if they told you last month they're not going to fire you this month so especially if you have a written contract yeah and then one month your boss will be like i'm not signing that and you're gonna be like oh i know what's going on and then you need to

have another meeting before that meeting saying, are you going to tell me in the next meeting that I am on track to not be fired? And you should put more layers in. Perfect. Yeah. I like that. I feel for both sides of this because I have both felt that I was about to be fired when I wasn't. And I have been a manager who's been guilty of not giving enough feedback to the team. And my instinct is to say like, things are going fine, so I don't need to intercede. But that can come off very differently to people on the team. And if I'm not giving them explicit direction and signals of how I think they're doing, then they'll read that into other things that aren't necessarily meant to be signals of how they're doing. And I found that life is

just much better on a team if people feel like they know how they're doing, whether they're doing well or not so great. As part of this, I found that it's really hard. And I think most managers don't give feedback well. It's a hard skill to develop. It's uncomfortable. It goes against a lot of our inclinations. So I think this is kind of the default where people kind of don't really know how well they're doing. And then there's some events that crystallizes it, whether it's a performance review or promotion cycle that happens or doesn't happen. And then they go back to this fog of like, I still work here, so I can't be doing that bad. But am I doing great? Am I almost doing great? Am I doing horribly? I think this is just the norm, sadly. Managers struggle

to give good feedback. Yeah. That's because it's hard. Managers have an imperfect view of the performance of their people, not only because it's hard to quantify, but also because they just don't see everything from every perspective. And so you might be surprised to learn that your manager actually doesn't know how well you're doing at all. And they might have some visibility into some anecdotes, but they might not have a complete picture. And so asking them to give feedback can be hard. And so that's why I like 360 peer feedback, where managers collect feedback on your behalf, and then present that to you as unfiltered as possible. Then you can really know like, this is what my team thinks. And your manager can kind of collate that and form a

conclusion about it and tell you you're doing okay, or you're not doing okay. But it's really hard for a manager to sit down and say, you're doing 28. Yeah, I, this is a deep, deep topic about how to give good feedback as a manager and why it's important. And I feel like we could talk forever about it. It's not the situation the listener is in, though. I just brought it up to underscore the fact that this is the norm, I think. And the fact that the question asker got a helpful semi-annual performance review makes this probably better than the norm, honestly, where often those are not the most helpful. So I think recognizing this is how it generally works and working to change that is different than feeling like there's something wrong with you

to have this happen to you i guess that's that's the point like there's nothing wrong with you that this is the situation you're in this is the situation most people are in yes yes and it shouldn't be and i hope that the the general level of skill at feedback improves in engineering management but we are where we are right now i was reading a book actually that said it was by a person who's who's managed a bunch of managers and she said she'll do skip level interviews with people who report to the managers who report to her. And the most common piece of feedback when she asked, what could your manager be doing better is give me more feedback. It's it's yeah, it happens. Okay, there you go. There the case is made. We've established it. You're not alone.

What do that? What does a nanny mouse do? I think you're already doing most of the important things, which is telling your manager that you want feedback. You've been very clear that you need it. And every six months, it sounds like you're getting a pretty good reinforcing piece of evidence that you're not going to get fired. But I think the real question here is, what are the indicators I should be on the lookout for that will tell me I'm about to get fired or that my manager is truly unhappy with my work? Because even though they say, you're doing fine, I want to know what they're really thinking. And there are some indicators like that, but they're really fuzzy and easy to misinterpret. So, I mean, the clearest indicator is, hey, we're putting you on

a special plan because we want your performance to improve. And those are typically called PIPs or performance improvement plans. And that's like, if a manager sits down with you and says, you're going on a PIP, that means your performance in the eyes of the manager is definitely low. And you are basically on the way out the door unless you can make a real big improvement, right? But even those PIPs typically take 30 to 90 days, right? Yeah. To get through. Yeah. So you have warning and you have time to recover, but that's pretty typical. Not always though. Not always though. Like if you, if you do really egregious stuff, you know, like let's say you

start making racist comments at work or something like that you might just get fired just immediately right yeah i don't get the sense that's the situation i mean everyone is everyone should be one racist comment away from getting fired yes if you say that stuff you should be gone like i don't know that that's a source of anxiety if i i assume it's more performance based about like was this too slow are they unhappy that this took too long or didn't come out right or right so so what other signals should we be on the lookout for oh man that's a really good question and i can't think of an answer so our question asker has admitted that they are prone to anxiety i can't think of any answer that's not going to just like cause an anxiety episode you know like

because because like you said they're all subtle signals i've seen it happen where if it happens quickly people bounce out and the team kind of like pulls away from them and that's not necessarily a healthy behavior a way to handle it but it's like you can sense the smell of getting fired on the person uh what do you mean what do you mean pulls away i didn't quite follow that like so there's a case i'm thinking of a new person joined they passed the interview process they joined the team and immediately you could tell there were some issues and people kind of tried to work through them and help this person or give feedback and it didn't get better and eventually this happened relatively quickly actually people kind of gave up and we're and

we're like okay i'll just avoid this person because it's okay the work isn't great it's hard to work with them we'll just pull away maybe not even consciously right like yeah yeah it wasn't like no one no one sat by them at lunch or something it was just like the team routed around them i see but but again this is this is like a pretty egregious thing you know like yeah it was clear when they joined that there was a problem and it happened pretty quickly i think it was within a month that they uh that they were hired and then fired okay so probably not the situation here yeah i mean how many firings have you witnessed not not even just had to do but like had to participate in or or been around like can you think of signals or signs that you could have

seen from that person's perspective you know the firings that i've witnessed again it was a case where the managers didn't give the greatest feedback and i think it was it came as a surprise to the person yeah that's what like you'll never know good luck question answered you know the the worst firing i saw was that case too where it was someone who struggled for a long time everyone on the team knew maybe there were some signs in that that the managers there were consistently working with this person to improve performance and everyone else was it was a very hands-off environment for everyone else but i think it still felt sudden to them and there was certainly never like a, you need to do better or you will get fired conversation. Yeah. You know, I just want

to call out one possible indicator to keep an eye on, but like Jameson said, this is a really risky indicator to call out because it could be harmless and it might just cause anxiety. And then, you know, you end up reading into these situations too, too much. But like, if you are seeing that you are consistently given less and less important tasks to do, and there's not an explanation, like you know when i give an an engineer an unimportant task i will tell them like hey this may seem unimportant or insignificant in some reason or in some way but it's important for these reasons and i'm sorry to give it to you but someone's got to do it and this time it just fell to you you know and so i try to kind of give almost a cop-out or at least some kind of motivator

when i when that happens but if that's all you do and the management management is not giving any kind of explanation as to why. And you see your other teammates doing really cool stuff. And maybe you've even asked to work on some of that cool stuff. That could be an indicator that you don't have the trust of your leadership. Yeah, I like what you said about trust, where it's generally accompanied by a lack. Being fired is preceded by losing trust in your ability to execute. So I think that's an interesting signal. I do think there is still something here. The question asker said that they've been pretty persistent about asking their manager for feedback. And that still feels like the best answer to me, where you can read into these signals and that might

cause horrifying problems. But it still feels like your manager needs to know that you have this fear of getting fired all the time. I'm sure that that affects your work. And if you are not going to be fired and they can remove that fear i think it would probably result in you working more effectively so it's in their best interest to address as well absolutely so the question asker says i've told my manager about my anxiety and that i'd like constant feedback i think you need to keep telling them and it could be if you have regular feedback sessions or one-on-ones with them maybe you need to add a recurring question where you just ask how am i doing like can you tell me about my performance this past whatever amount of time and and then maybe less regularly

emphasize to them hey i have this kind of slightly irrational but still their anxiety that even though things seem like they're going great i'm just going to get fired and this regular feedback helps me calibrate that in the one time that i the biggest time i felt like this i did have that kind of conversation with my manager and his first response was you're not going to get fired and his second response was why do you feel that way and then we dug into it quite a bit and and i think we uncovered some helpful stuff in terms of how to reflect value more and how to choose tasks that are that are more important or or it turned into both useful feedback for me and useful um kind of career direction things for me that's cool he was also a very good manager yeah so maybe that won't

happen this way with your manager i don't know i guess i'm just bragging about my good experience Yeah. So, you know, on the show, we've mentioned before, I think this has come up before this kind of thing with anxiety. And we should say we are not mental health professionals. We are space psychiatrists. We only deal with extra solar mental health. And so in my unprofessional, earthly mental health opinion, it might help to have a trusted professional who can help you navigate some of these situations. You know, that's a great point. Yeah, I will readily admit that i go see a psychologist and it's been one of the most helpful things for both my life and my work life as well because so much of that is tied together anyone who spends an hour a week

with me needs a full-time psychologist on staff it's like to counterbalance the hour i go see a psychologist for an hour a week yeah it's like a detox for my brain perfect all right well all Did we answer the question? I think so. Good luck, Anonymous. All right, I'm going to read this next question. This is from a just regular old anonymous listener. Okay.

Hey, Dave and Jameson, love the show and your insight. I have been having a problem on my team that I hope you can help with. We are a team of engineers that have internal customers. It's a bit of a backend of the backend role. The problem is none of the other engineers are customer focused. They don't engage with the real needs of our customer teams.

Tickets come in, they do what's in the ticket as it reads exactly and we end up with the requirements getting lost tickets needing to be reopened and our our reputation going down the tubes i have taken it on myself to engage with the customer and help them out but now i've become a glorified customer service rep and i can't do much of my own work because i'm passing messages back and forth between engineers who don't like to talk to their customers my manager says the team needs training and they're going to work with them but this has been going on for months should i take the soft skills advice of quit your job or continue being a middleman oh go ahead that was a double hmm yeah i this one line stuck out to me i've

taken on yeah i've become a glorified customer service rep and i can't do much of my own work because i'm passing back and forth i'm passing messages back and forth between engineers and customers that's also what some people call product management or project management in in its degenerate form that's like you talk to the customer you tell the engineers what the customer said and then hand the thing that the engineers built back to the customer right or hand back a message saying the engineers can't build this yeah you just need to tweak your fake job title from glorified customer service rep to glorified product manager or project manager yeah or maybe like bad project manager underqualified program manager yeah or unwilling program manager there

you go reluctant yes i was actually gonna say sounds like your company needs to hire a program manager yeah there are people who do this and it's their job and they're good at it and they love it and they add lots of value when they do it huge sounds like your company doesn't have any of those but also yeah i mean also these engineers like ah i i feel your pain i really don't like being on teams that just quote do what they're told yeah right like oh man sometimes people i think interpret just do what you're told as being really customer centric and super like the customer is always right. I'm going to do exactly what they say. But in reality, like the best product teams, they deliver what the customer needs, even if it's a little different from what

the customer literally said. Yeah. It sounds like you don't have one of those teams. So I have a friend named Brandon who does a podcast called Managing Up and it's really good. They have an episode about working with product. And one of the, one of the concerns they talk about is this feeling of like, oh, the requirements aren't detailed enough. And his point is that the end road of that discussion is binders and binders of specs and like you could get detailed requirements if that's what you want but it's kind of a monkey's paw situation like you want detailed requirements do you now it's your job to write requirements and the kind of degenerate case of engineers just wanting to know exactly what to build and building exactly what they're

told is is that it's that you have to write exactly what they should build and that's not the dream of most engineers i think i feel like they want to build good work that's valued and they don't want to spend all their time digging through this very in-depth process cmm level 16 whatever you get up to so that's kind of the stick i guess like get more interested in the product or else we will have to impose this heavyweight process to determine what you work on but it sounds like this person's team is exactly that kind of engineer just give me just Give me an unending list of tickets, and I will implement what they say. Yeah, maybe they should go work in the defense industry then.

It sounds like there's a government contract waiting for you. Maybe that's what they're already doing. Yeah. I'm sure there are great people in both those industries that I'm aligned. Yeah, way to go. Way to dig yourself out of that one. My stereotypes are my stereotypes. Can't pry away my defense industry stereotypes.

In my experience, engineers or teams that feel like this have been hurt and are responding to past trauma whether it's on the job or on previous jobs where maybe they've tried to engage and been told like get your nose away or they've been burned by crazy deadlines you know and and intense deadline pressure removes your ability to think about the work beyond just cranking it out you can't you can't take a step back and think what does the customer want if it's like this needs to be delivered yesterday and what are you talking about you want to go meet with them and see what their needs are. And you don't have time for that. You have to get this code out. So I feel like there are certainly some engineers who prefer to work

more this way where you hand them things to do and they hand back code. But in my experience, teams of people like this have been told that they cannot contribute value in anything but cranking out the code. And that seems like a problem that you could help resolve by showing that the code they produce will have more context and meaning if it's tempered with this understanding of what the customer wants and it's not just like a your code will be better it's it's like the project will go better we will work faster we will deliver more if we figure out what they want so we deliver that instead of reading a ticket writing our what we think our interpretation of the ticket is handing it back finding out it's wrong and then doing this back and forth it's

not just like you should want to do this for the craft as i raise my hand theatrically but literally to make your life better you'll you'll build the right thing and ship it better and more often yeah and you might just be proud of your work yeah so i think i just recommended an inspirational speech as the solution to this do you have any like podiums or oh like dramatic scenery mountaintops you could take the team to oh yeah the wind whipping at your back you're gonna need to be in great shape and have super long hair to pull this off so take whatever time you need to prep for that okay and maybe a megaphone yeah pose dramatically make sure as you lift the megaphone up to your lips that you're flexing your bicep very casually but noticeably

right like you're not trying yeah you're not trying it's just like this happens oh huh look how veiny that is weird um anyways i think that'll add to my points about product management let me just move these rocks around to build a nice stand for me to stand on oh oh it's the blarney stone that strongman stone that that lets people win competitions huh look how easily i lifted it i didn't expect that isn't that the blarney stone i don't know oh no that's the one where you you kiss the stone and it endows you with magical powers okay same thing wrong stone but there are these there are these like famous stones that strong men pick up yeah i watched i actually watched one of those competitions in person a couple of weeks ago really oh that'd

be awesome i'd love to go to one of those it was it was even better than you might think just these gigantic outrageously strong men and women picking up heavy stuff yeah that'd be amazing yeah they were very large and they just had to throw big rocks as far as they could yeah it's just like the most like primitive brutal thing in the world and yet i love i loved every bit of it it was great yeah anyway i could talk i could talk more but i won't that will help get into strongman do you think there might be an incentive system that's broken here i mean you mentioned past trauma but do you think there's something currently going on at this company that's causing these people to be completely narrowly focused i think it could be yeah that

kind of gets into the deadline stuff too like if your incentive is get all your tickets done and that's what gets rewarded then that's going to affect the team's behavior so i i think you're right that examining the incentives that the team has would maybe lend some some insight into how to address it because something is contributing to it and and people want to feel good about their work i feel like i mean there could be a layer of cynicism on top but i think generally people want to enjoy their jobs and they want to do good work and they want to feel like it's meaningful and this doesn't sound meaningful to me yeah although i don't want to malign these people too badly because, I mean, maybe in their eyes, they're doing a great job. I mean, they're doing

what the ticket said. They're implementing the code. It works. You know, it just, what the ticket asked for wasn't quite right. And so maybe, you know, they're failing to challenge assumptions in some cases. But, you know, at the end of the day, not every engineer needs to be a full-time assumption challenger. You know, I mean, that can get, that can be equally problematic on the other end of the spectrum. And so you kind of need a mix of people on a team. And I think what this question asker is learning is just how much effort it takes from a leadership perspective to keep the the ship going forward in the right direction to intercept bad ideas and to make sure they don't become you know boat anchors did you like how i use two different sailing metaphors in

one sentence i did i was hoping for a third you need you need to look through sounds great through the porthole of the i got nothing of the like kanban board and adjust your main sails as you trim your rudder swab the poop deck the poop deck is definitely the integration test suite yeah and you're already swabbing it pretty hard here i think yeah yeah that's a good point i i don't want to say these people are are they're bad i'm more saying something in their environment i think makes them act this way yeah sure and it could also be kind of a lack of context or understanding where um i've seen this on teams i've worked on where the the less context they have the the lower quality of the work yeah and the more we have to spend a bunch of time redoing things

and it wasn't because this team wanted to do bad work it was because there were some communication issues with other teams and and it kind of turned into this situation where work got tossed over the wall and we tossed stuff back and what do you know like sometimes that means it doesn't work very well so it wasn't a lack of desire it was more that no one was kind of modeling or rewarding or encouraging that behavior of we want to solve this problem let's really dig in and figure out how to do it and and demonstrate that it will work well and but that's i don't know how do you do that as an individual contributor that sounds like your your manager's job it does and it sounds like you're already trying to model that behavior right now and it's not really having the effect that

you'd hoped but speaking of your manager i i would bet that your manager just absolutely loves you right now because you're the only person trying to keep this team's reputation afloat there's another sailing reference for you and while everyone else is kind of just doing their job you are like taking it to the next level and really showing some strong ownership and customer obsession here and that's great so i don't know i mean i think you should probably sit down with your manager some more and say you know i feel like i'm carrying the weight of this team what do we need to do here you say they need training but i don't think training's gonna solve it and maybe they've even done training and that would be great if they have because you could say look

nothing has changed. Training as the scapegoat. Ah, that old, that longstanding business practice. Well, just need training. I mean, I would probably drive this home a little bit harder with your manager and point out key instances where your team's reputation has been damaged due to this mentality and say, look, I'm trying to question assumptions. I'm trying to do the right thing for the team, but it's a bit of an uphill battle and I need your support. And it's possible your manager doesn't really know what to do. But they probably have a voice or a platform to do it from if you can give them some ideas. Yeah, I think there's a mix of inclinations towards this kind of work among developers, and some are much more pulled to the product side, and some really are pulled

to the technical side. And maybe you can identify it's possible that there'll be several people who don't want anything to do with this. But maybe you can identify kind of natural allies or people you think would be interested in it, and help mentor them on this a little bit or share the load a little bit because part of the gist of this question is i'm a developer like i don't want this to be my job full time i can't produce any technical output while i'm doing all this yeah but if you can spread that work among the team a little bit and get some backup i think that might spread through the rest of the team a little bit more love it well have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck anonymous if people would like their own questions answered

what can they do go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question or you can fill out our forum. Thank you so much to everyone who's asked. We really appreciate it. There's a lot of questions and we just love every single one of them. Thank you so much. We'll catch you next week.