Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 174: Bottleneck manager and how to tech lead

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “I’m into my second job of leading a team of software engineers and want to level up my coaching skills. In my first role I accidentally fell into the deep end of management “fun” by taking on a team of 10 people. One of the big problems I faced was being the “go to” or “sign off” person for a lot of different things, and I perpetuated this problem by showering people with my incredible answers (based on my obviously incredible know-it-all-ness) and thus reinforcing my goto factor. I was aware of coaching as a concept then, but didn’t incorporate it into my leadership style, which I believe contributed to my eventual burn out in the role. Over the last year in my current team lead role I’ve been much more deliberate about various aspects of leadership, but my coaching prowess is still struggling. When I’m asked questions by my team, my default response is to jump to a specific answer based on my own opinion, and it’s only afterwards that I slap my forward and yell out “missed coaching opportunity!” (as people near me back away slowly with concerned looks on their faces). What are some effective techniques to try and build a habit of using coaching as a primary means to help my team work through problems? I just became a technical lead for a team at my company. I’ve never held a leadership role like this before. Do you have any advice for how to do a good job?

it takes more than deleting trailing white space to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 174 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 i have been a very overpaid manual error prone linter before early in my career i'm so glad those days are gone i feel like most languages have tools that format stuff for you nicely and it's great well we have a lot of people to thank who are supporting us i'm gonna shout out some folks who are supporting us on patreon thank you to matthew voidovich the agile ventures charity ted nugent crash bandicoot zach grannon this engineer goes up to 11 louis santos nick cantar

vinlock taras karuk sean sunny tie dimitri yanson britney ellick florian tatsil sonic the hedgehog Ivor Robotnik, Mireille Rousseau, Chris Hogan, and Stanley Tactical Radio. Thank you to those folks who are supporting us at the level where we shout them out every week. And thank you to new supporters, Eve Gerken, G. Josh John, Latina Developer, and TheLetterJ. Thank you to those folks who are new supporters and are getting a one-time shout-out. And if you want to support the show, you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon, and you will get an invite to our wonderful Slack community. We send them out every month, and we just sent out a bunch of them, and there are new folks joining, and it's great.

it's great to see all the energy and excitement and new perspectives and stories yeah it is awesome truly speaking of awesome we had an awesome listener write in with a question shall i read it please i say i say that first i'm just i'm just like in awe of your transition though which has now been shattered yeah mine is usually like well question time huh the transition of awkward silence although i gotta say i i said that as if this was like the first time we've had someone write in. That is not the case. We have not been making up all these questions for the last three years. Finally, a real human. One that wasn't spit out by a neural network. Okay, this comes from a listener named Gareth. He says, I'm into my second job of leading

a team of software engineers and want to level up my coaching skills. In my first role, I accidentally fell into the deep end of management quote fun by taking on a team of 10 people one of the big problems i faced was being the go-to or sign-off person for a lot of different things and i perpetuated this problem by showering people with my incredible answers based on my obviously incredible know-it-allness and thus reinforcing my go-to factor i was aware of coaching as a concept then but didn't incorporate it into my leadership style which i believe contributed to my eventual burnout in the role over the last year in my current team lead role i've been much more deliberate about various aspects of leadership but my coaching prowess is still struggling

when i'm asked questions by my team my default response is to jump to a specific answer based on my own opinion and it's only afterwards that i slap my forehead and yell out quote missed coaching opportunity i don't know why i said quote in front of that as people near me back away slowly with concerned looks on their faces what are some effective techniques to try and build a habit of using coaching as a primary means to help my team work through problems oh such a good question i mean the fact that you're asking this question is like you're already way ahead of me yeah i think you're you're in like the top 10 percentile 10th percentile of the 90th percentile you're good you're good at your job

better than i am at numerical metaphors the word you're looking for is tp90 you're in it yes i have heard of that and know what it is i know every one of those letters and numbers i i also like that you recognize that there's something seductive about being the person who knows everything that people come to for advice or for questions or permission it feels it feels like you're doing a lot right when someone comes up to you and says hey i want to do this thing you say yes do it like point like a captain of industry you have like your four bluetooth headsets all at once and are spinning around in your chair ordering stuff and selling high buying low wait what yes that's right stocks and bonds and yeah you thought i was gonna flip that

around and buy low and sell wait other way buy high and sell low that's what i do in my personal day trading expensive socially acceptable gambling habit bought some apple stock at the peak it went down from the peak it turns out yeah but it's gone up enough so that by now i've only lost 15 dollars all right way to go yeah anyways tangent get out of here tangent go away you oh my gosh i'm just saying this is a seductive this is a it's it's an exciting feeling being a team lead can feel like you're not doing something that often so it fills this gap of like what am i actually doing oh what i'm doing is telling people i telling people what to do and solving their problems and giving them advice and things so

i i can see why it's why people tend to fall into this especially because people that get promoted to team lead are usually capable and usually know what to do or are used to knowing what to do that's how they kind of perform well in the organization to get recognized to move up to that level yeah so how do you avoid that trap who says it's a trap i mean what if you just love being the hero all the time i think the question asker answered it oh they gave a name gareth i think gareth answered it because it can lead to burnout if you're the single dependency for everything then turns out you can never sleep you can never go on vacation or everything falls apart without you and you're training your team to not do anything without you that's right you're

also training your team to resent you because you've become so indispensable that they that you are like a crutch for them yeah yeah i think that's a good way to turn the corner that it can feel good temporarily for you but you're not helping the team grow and that's the one of the products that you're supposed to produce on as a team lead is the team's output and the other product is kind of the growth of the people on the team which leads into more output it's just kind of a longer cycle than the immediate actions you take to increase output so you could look at that is another responsibility your responsibility is to help the team grow and help them get better at their jobs and you do that by coaching so so we've kind of laid out the problem which i guess

the question asker already did yeah and actually better than we did let's be let's be honest some something's got to fill this airtime though okay it's not gonna fill itself okay so that's the problem what are some techniques to try to build a habit of using coaching instead of rushing in and being the hero. And I think one thing you have to do is you have to get used to, what's the word? Not making people feel uncomfortable,

but being used to the idea that you're not going to take away people's discomfort immediately. In fact, you might make their discomfort more uncomfortable. What do you mean? Well, like if someone comes to you with a problem and you have an answer,

your instinct is to immediately resolve their problem and give them the answer. But maybe the better thing to do in this situation is to say, yeah, you know, I understand you have this problem you know what do you want to do and just let them talk through it and this means that you're not going to cure it instantly okay yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna make everything go away you're not gonna solve every problem problem for them like I think the I think what I'm saying is learning to help people solve their problems such that they

grow while solving it instead of giving them the answers so how do you balance that with the fact that they might solve it in a different way than you would which automatically means worse right because you know the right good way and they might not do the thing if you if you don't tell them do this they might not do the thing that you want to tell them that's right yeah so there's this concept in ai called reinforcement learning and this is when someone does something wrong you just rage on them okay just just bump those weights way up in the that's right and in this case it's an actual neural network made of actual neurons that you must rage on so you yell at them you embarrass them you call them out obviously these are all good things to do and then they'll

do the thing that you know you wanted them to do in the first place yeah my understanding of the state of ai is that you you lock the ai into a room and just put in front of it a television that is just playing you know those weird youtube kids algorithmically generated stuff it's like oh ai you're trying to do this to my kids huh well have a taste of your own medicine and then just just force it to suffer in this yes torture chamber and then you say now is this a banana or a cat try again now that you've seen the price of failure exactly okay so so what do you do when someone inevitably comes up with an idea that you think is inferior by virtue of it not being your idea sorry it's such a terrible thing to say yeah because i'll be honest i feel like i'm at the stage

of my career where i'm delegation and coaching is probably the thing i need to work on the most or one of the things i need to work on the most so i'm thinking about this stuff and i like to be in control and i like to be right and i'm pretty convinced i'm right so this is a thought that i have by the way my team's hiring yeah if you want to be logged in a room in a room with youtube yeah so there's kind of the trite answer of well people will come up with ideas better that you never could have thought of yourself and that's true that happens sometimes but sometimes they're worse they're not always better i think i think i to answer that i would say hearken back to the crappy ideas that you've had in the past and then remember how great it

felt after you came to the realization that they were crappy and iterated on them and made them better and how proud you felt to deliver something that was high quality but that you had to pay a price to earn it and why would you deprive these people of going through that process i am not familiar with the thing you describe what you're saying is um you might be able to give some feedback that basically says this isn't good enough but don't say because it's not this idea that you should be doing instead i wasn't even get into that part that's way hard actually telling telling them is that i'm just saying okay allow people the space and freedom to to fail and then when they fail you know okay you want to set

up of course you want mechanisms and safety nets to prevent catastrophic failure but allow people to fail within a safe margin so that they can iterate on it themselves and let them feel the impact of the failure hopefully you haven't set up a system where you have to swoop in and say you did that wrong like you should have systems and automation and things that tell them they did it wrong. That doesn't seem realistic. I mean, so everyone has infinity more things to do than they have time to get them done. How do you have this extra time to just let someone fail for a while? I don't know. Have you ever failed? Where did you find that time? There's always time to fail. I mean, of course there's time to fail. And if the one fear we have is that by giving

too specific of answers and not letting people the latitude to solve things on their own is that we don't have time for failure well then we don't have time for growth because i think when you when you screw up that is how you grow is you learn through those mistakes at least that's how i've learned it feels like there's room for a few different sizes of feedback cycles where one that you're saying is the feedback is the project does or does not work and it's kind of much longer term and you just let it play out as the team leader, the manager. But it feels like there's got to be some faster cycles too that aren't just like, I washed my hands of this.

Good luck with your metrics in six months. I hope it works out for you. This is called coaching. Good luck. My job here is done. Boy, there's so much time to go on vacation when I coach instead of work. I love this coaching.

Coaching looks like a beach. just a quick 10 minute phone call that sets the stage for the next six months what i what i meant and that this is why i mentioned safety nets and and guardrails to prevent catastrophic failures you know you have to nudge of course and guide along the way and i'm using all these euphemisms because i'm having a hard time thinking of a specific example here's my in my head how this might work you want to let someone run a project and you have some idea of the purpose of it and the end goal and you kind of try and communicate that and then say okay come back with a plan for how we're going to do this then they come back with a plan and you give

some feedback on the plan instead of you creating the plan and then dictating it to them so there's there's some kind of earlier feedback of their own efforts and then you minor course corrections is what you're looking for. Yeah. You're giving course corrections and hopefully that avoids catastrophic failure because you do some early reviews before it's way down the track. And then you can kind of keep checking in instead of telling them what to do. Yeah, exactly. I think that's right. And I think you have to lay out a framework for people to be able to operate in that mode where you say, okay, here's what I expect from you. I want to see a design doc written up with the plan that includes what the software will look like and how it'll work. And then let's

review that next week you know and that'll be the first check-in or whatever and and if you lay that out i think people can really thrive but if you say i'll do the design i will answer all the questions and then i will give you the bits that you're supposed to work on and tell you to work in that little sandbox that i created you fill in the sand i'll do all the boundaries and i'll tell you what kind of sand to put in it yeah and use this shovel right that i designed for you you're not holding it quite right here let me get behind you and adjust your grip a little bit yeah exactly again metaphors but i mean my i feel like the most professional growth that i've had as a software engineer are the times when my leaders have been really hands-off uh and they've just said go for

it and like i felt a sense of ownership and that ownership drove me to really engage with the problem and think hard about it and do my best work and you know what i screwed up several times i made mistakes technical mistakes uh interpersonal mistakes fashion mistakes just some horrible crimes that was deep into your cargo tan cargo shorts uh socks white socks and those strappy sandals birkenstocks yeah i will say that at one time during this phase i came to work with on accident mismatched shoes don't worry everybody i can deploy to production without bringing anything down no seriously we had like a bunch of like senior leaders coming into town we were a remote office

and and so i had to get up extra early which means it was really dark and so i didn't want to turn on any lights and wake up anybody in my house so i actually put on two different shoes and i didn't realize till i got to work and i'm sitting in the meeting with all these you know executives that i am wearing two different shoes that's a bad look when you try and do the power move and kick back you're lean back in your chair put your feet up on the desk oh dave likes sketchers and doc martens those are two brands he enjoys huh that's when if they criticize you you say fashion crimes are for ugly people but i'm beautiful so this is actually trend setting there's there's kind of like this giving someone freedom to to

explore a project but there's also just the general day-to-day like people come to you with problems that's and that's that can feel like part of your job as the manager like we talked about earlier to solve them what do you do if they come and say hey i have this conflict with this other person or it's it's not like please tell me what to do to make this project work it's it's more like i'm coming to you with an issue yeah you know i'm the kind of leader who asks a lot of questions when someone brings a concern to me especially an interpersonal concern is i'll just have question question question question and there's a very good chance you'll leave my office without feeling like your problem is totally resolved you know and one of the

questions I'll ask is you know what do you think we should do because I really want to partner with you on solving these kinds of problems I don't want to just turn around and be like well I will take care of this you can think no more about it it's on my plate and I will solve all the things yeah yeah that's a really good point about asking what you think we should do I also have had some success asking what would you like me to do and you have to kind of phrase it right and have the right relationship so it doesn't sound like you're just dismissing them but sometimes people want your feedback on what the idea is and they want to go do it and and that's all they're looking for and if you just assume that they're asking you to solve their problem you might be coming

off as micromanaging them when that's not what they're looking for too and and that also kind of nudges people into thinking about the answer if they haven't thought about it yeah there's i mean there's there's a there's a balance here because you should exist for a purpose and if you if you can be replaced by a magic eight ball you're probably not doing a good job but there is a balance of helping people solve their own problems and encouraging them to do that that also could be a thing you explicitly say to them too where if it's someone you feel like needs some coaching or would benefit from it you could you could say that to them and say hey i'd like to coach you to get better at these things that will probably involve you doing more of the work

yourself but i'm happy to talk through solutions and give guidance and get you to a place where you feel capable of doing it on your own but i don't want to just solve every problem for you yeah i totally agree because that would cut into my beach time you mean your coaching time my yes co-beaching time one of the things gareth says is that they became the go-to and sign-off person for a lot of different things and that they perpetuated this problem by actually giving lots of you know high value answers and so it's almost like this weird paradox where if you're really good at helping people solve their problems and you continue doing it then you will get just bombarded with that and soon that's all you will do and then

eventually you'll become obsolete because actually the the systems will evolve and architecture will change and your knowledge will not move with it because you're actually not working with the systems you're just the you know frontline customer support rep for your team right yeah and so one of the things i like i like to do when people bring these kinds of questions to me is i like to think who else on the team could benefit from this knowledge or who else on the team has a little bit of knowledge in this area and i will ask the question asker to go and partner with that person to solve the problem and say look i i don't know or if i do know i can say i i i don't know how to deflect it we'll come back to that later but i'll say hey will you go will you go talk to so-and-so

I do know, but I'm not going to tell you. I know. We definitely have to come back to that. But I will say, go talk to so-and-so on the team. Will you work with them and try to find a solution? And let me know what you find. And then make sure they close the loop and update documentation and more scalable patterns for sharing this kind of knowledge in the future. That's great.

I love that. That feels like a good way to have managers still provide value is they don't have to know all the answers or give all the answers. but they should know the broader organization enough to know who can help with those answers. And if you're managing or leading a team, then you might have that context that individual contributors don't, where they're focused more on their individual contributions. So they don't know that someone else is the expert on that thing that they're asking you a question about. This phrase about sign-off person, that feels scary to me because I feel like there are so many processes just sitting there operating because no one turned them off yet that involves

some kind of sign off and they're they're they're always one person waking up and saying wait what if we just didn't what if we just did the thing instead of got sign off they're like that close from being useless i mean approvals proliferate in bureaucracy but they're kind of a bureaucracy smell too they think that's the summary of my point that you should be helping people solve their problems feels high value and important and it's an easy trap to fall into and approving stuff feels the value versus feeling is much different there where i feel like it's often not super valuable okay don't become the approver that's that's like the a degenerate case of this single point of failure yeah all right i have no more wisdom here do you well you do but you're not

going to share it that's right i'm going to ask you to go and talk to someone else about this okay well one thing we said we would come back to and haven't yet is how do you deflect someone even if you know the answer should you tell them you don't know the answer and let them grow on their own or is there you lie to them yes is there a better way to manage that you shouldn't lie to them no hey you have a question for me and i'm gonna make you think i'm dumb and when you find out you'll find out i've been dishonest that seems bad i think it'd be better to say i know the answer but it's better for you to find it out than for me to just tell you doesn't that feel bad too though yeah i think you've got to look at the the difference in effort from them asking you

versus finding it out themselves and the long-term benefits of that if it's a thing that is just a one-time random thing that you could tell them in 30 seconds and it would take them forever to find out you could probably just tell them but if it's a recurring question that will come up a lot i think you can make the case and say hey i could tell you the answer but i think it's better for the growth of the team that you figure out and kind of we spread this knowledge around more of how to find this out yeah and i mean it also behooves you to write some of these things down and last week you mentioned a co-worker who did a really good job of not just coming up with the answers but of documenting their answer finding process i thought that was really good for coaching

purposes yeah yeah that's a good point all right have we answered the question yes we're good to go next question this is from a listener named luke i just became a technical lead for a team at my company i've never held a leadership role like this before do you have any advice for how to do a good job oh new technical lead congratulations that's great i wonder if luke's gotten the invitation to the secret technical lead society i think that's this podcast they are now in it welcome i i know luke a little bit and i'm confident that he'll be amazing but that doesn't answer the question there's more than one person named luke james well yeah but we have more i'm just teasing okay email addresses are unique okay unless they i

guess all the that's the secret luke society where they all share the same luke-based email address okay we've talked a lot around technical lead but we've never just sat down and said here's how you do a good job so dave i'm ready crap i'm coaching you to explain to get better at explaining how to be a good tactical lead i've given you this gift this opportunity all right does this mean you're going to go to the beach now uh in my mind i'm always there well i sit here and flail from ipanema is just on loop in my head so i mean what does a tech lead even do i feel like it's pretty fuzzy certainly is like why don't we assume no people management responsibility so no performance reviews no hiring and firing

that's pretty common but you're you're still generally responsible for a project or maybe a team of a couple projects and it's more focused on the delivery of the project and probably some amount of well it says tech lead so some amount of technical guidance on that project yeah i I think one of the main changes from being a senior individual contributor to a technical lead is as a senior individual contributor, you are expected to help out the team as a whole, but also your output is judged mostly based on your own accomplishments. And as a tech lead, that gets flipped a little bit where I think most tech leads are still expected to contribute technically to code and architecture directly, but they're now

responsible for the output of the project as a whole. And that's their main responsibility. and if you are just cranking out stuff by yourself but the project is failing then you are failing as a tech lead whereas as a senior engineer i think you could still look at that and say you're succeeding in your role but the project has problems i see okay and it's probably it's probably like 70 30 either way where a senior engineer has some responsibility to the whole team but it's it's kind of inverted those proportions in a tech lead and i also think sometimes in on most teams individual contributors look to the tech lead for approval for for bigger

decisions and and kind of look to them as the final voice yeah like the tiebreaker kind of yeah yeah like what what tech stack we're going to use or things like that for sure but that's i mean deciding on a tech stack happens at the beginning of a project and it's only greenfield projects and it's only greenfield projects where there's still an opening to debate a tech stack so i don't know that that happens that often you say you say that they only we only choose a tech stack at the beginning of a project but clearly you haven't worked in modern web development there's lots of little on ramps onto the project to choose a new tech stack yeah i guess that's a good point i'm just teasing no you're right i mean these are the kinds of big decisions i would look

to a tech lead to to make having said that tech leads do not effective tech leads do not work in isolation even on very big decisions yeah they don't they don't just mandate to the team yes like i've chosen foobar we are going to use it right yeah i think a really effective tech lead is someone who can create an environment where all of the team feels engaged and can participate and that their voices are all heard and then can reconcile the discordant views on the team and produce a solution that the team can get behind even if they didn't all agree with it initially i think one so i keep thinking about how is this different from an engineering manager So we talked about the HR stuff, and I keep coming back to this idea that you're still contributing individually in some degree for most tech leads, I think.

Does that match your understanding? Yeah, I think so. Where you're not completely away from the code, you're still expected to write code and produce code. I think one other difference is if you're responsible for the success of the project, then you do the thing that will make the project successful, not the thing that is most interesting to you. So if there's like a really gnarly piece or a tricky but unsatisfying thing to work on or a big risky thing, that's the work that you work on more than the area of specialty that you have. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Like you're trying to work, your individual work should go towards where it will move the project forward the most, not just what you want to work on.

I mean, really, that should probably apply to every engineer on the team. But as a tech lead, I think it matters a lot more. yeah i think it matters a lot more and there's i think there's yeah there's this sliding scale in my head of individual contributor to someone who doesn't isn't in the code much at all and as that scale slides there's also like how much you get to pick stuff to do based on how fun it is and yeah that's that scale has shifted a little bit when you're a tech lead it can still be really fun and it's really satisfying to see a whole project get delivered oh yeah absolutely but You just might not write like the SAT solver or whatever piece of it that seems super cool

to you. Exactly. I think another good piece of advice I've gotten as a tech lead is when you want to empower your team, right? Because really, if you are working in isolation and maybe you're super amazing and you're making all these decisions, but the team is just kind of doing what you say, you're not actually as a team producing as much value as you could. And so one of the phrases I've heard given as advice that I really liked is once the

team has line of sight to a solution, you should back off and let them run that solution to the end. I like that. Makes sense. Another wrinkle we haven't talked about yet is communication. And as a tech lead, I think it's much more expected that you'll be the point of contact for status of the project, both to other people on the team and to external teams. You kind of have to have what's going on for the whole project in your head. And people want to know when it's going to be done and what are you blocked on and how's it coming and what's going well and and you're usually the person they look to for that status in my experience definitely whereas as an individual contributor they might ask you for your specific thing but if it's some other part of the project

you're not connected to then you just say i don't know yeah i think another thing you have to learn to do as a tech lead that you didn't have to do as much is time management whereas previously as an individual contributor you look at your day and you say okay i've got eight hours and i've got these JIRA tickets to work on, I guess I'll just work on these JIRA tickets. But as a tech lead, you're looking at your day and you're going, okay, I've got no block of time longer than one hour that's not interrupted by meetings. I've got, you know, 50 emails to respond to from other teams and other managers or other departments. And I just have so many competing priorities now that you have to learn how to manage that stuff. And I think that's a challenge and a new thing for a

lot of tech leads that are new to it that makes sense i think the most challenging part is the requirement to develop extensive martial arts skills that was surprising to me but it just like anything it gets better with practice and eventually you two will be able to kill an intruder with your bare hands that's the thing you learn in the tech lead club that you that's right the secret tech lead society your email's on the way so what about partnering with engineering management so we talked about how there's not people management with this position usually so there's someone else handling that stuff and as a tech lead there's often like a there's a manager responsible for the same people you are sometimes or sometimes it's someone who manages multiple teams how do

you how do you partner with them as a tech lead what feedback do you give them what what do they give you yeah this is super important i think with with your manager they're actually going to come to you with questions that might make you uncomfortable at first where they might need to know about people's performance, for example, you know, and you'll have to say like, you know, this person's performing above my expectations or below, and that'll be a data point that the manager uses. And so you probably will be dabbling in people management, but even though the buck stops with the people manager. The other thing is you'll be, you'll probably have a lot more influence over the product roadmap than you had before, where you need to be talking to product

managers, challenging assumptions, making sure that, you know, they understand the engineering effort required to deliver certain features they understand dependencies you know it's like well you may not know this but this one little feature is going to have this huge boulder that needs to be done before it can be done even though it seems small your job is to call those things out but you have to do that balancing act of being challenging to ideas that are you think are harmful but while also making sure that they know you're their partner and that you're here to support them yeah hmm have we answered the question no this is i don't know i mean this is the work of a lifetime yeah exactly maybe the reason we haven't talked about this in the past is that it's just so

long i mean it's a universe of things yeah we didn't even talk about like process or working working with product and how you do that in more detail or there's there's a bunch of stuff but i think the summary is you'll do great once you learn or you won't i mean that's the summary well i think yeah just focus on the martial arts and the rest will flow naturally from there. That's the summary. All right. Good luck, Luke. I do think you'll do great. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out as much or as little detail as you like. Also, if you'd like to give us a follow-up on the advice that we gave you

and one of your questions from past episodes, you can use that same form to let us know. And if you're comfortable, we'll share it on the air with every other listener. Jameson, how can people support the podcast they can go to soft skills audio click support us on patreon or they can tweet about the show that's a great way to support us we are we get nice tweets and we love all of them still we're not immune to nice that's right we haven't had enough yeah yeah we are we have not been filled and share it with other people that's a great way all right thank you catch you next week I'll see you next time.