Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 192: Giving feedback and messaging a team change

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

Hey, want to use Dropbox as your app’s production database? Well, check here. In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hello Dave & Jamison, first of all thank you for the show! I recently moved to a tech lead position and as such I will be asked by many people to provide feedbacks for performance reviews and promotions. Do you have any tip on how to provide good feedbacks, especially in the cases where you don’t constantly work with the interested people? Hello, guys! Thank you so much for the amazing content produced. I really enjoy the show. Thanks for the laughs and the knowledge.” I am a backend software developer working on a multidisciplinary team. There’s this other developer that really gets on my nerves. To maintain my sanity I am asking to change teams, and people keep asking me why I want to change. Should I tell my manager the real reason or is it better to say that I want new challenges? Maybe my manager can solve the problem and no one else leaves the team (I am not the first one to leave for this reason)

it takes more than using dropbox as your production database to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 192 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-tech stuff except once in a while we delve into using dropbox as a production database i just can't even imagine the the duct tape that has to be applied everywhere to make that work like it's got to be append only i mean how do you deal with conflicts what if two people write to the database at the same time jameson the mindset that gets you into using dropbox as a production database does not include these kinds of edge conditions

and less less people think we're making this up i'm going to actually put it in the show notes this time because it actually happened i think a listener pointed this out to us so yes thanks for that amazing journey down a rabbit hole covered in spikes that's right and this is one of the perks of joining the slack community the soft skills engineering slack community this is where we heard this is where we heard about this jameson why don't you tell people how they can do that i will yeah they can join by contributing any amount on patreon they can go to soft skills audio and click support us on patreon any amount gets you access to the slack community we send out invites every month to folks that joined and if you donate enough dollars enough dollary dues

then you get a shout out every single episode so shout out to all these people who are contributing at a level where they get that. Thank you to Scoof, Ivo Robotnik, Luke Bayliss, Luis Santos, Zach Grannon, Chris Hogan, Stanley Tactical Radio, Brayden Keynes, Nikolai Ilyushkin, Philip John Basile, Stephen Arman Lee, John Grant, Crash Bandicoot,

Vinlok, Matthew Wadovich, Nick Kantar, Ted Nugent, Agile Ventures, Charity Maple, Syrup, Sonic Hedgehog, Taras Haruk, Sunny Tai, Sean, and Michael Green. Thank you to all of you. Thank you to everyone who has contributed in the past. You really help make the show possible. And as an example of what it contributes to,

we recently hit our bandwidth cap on where we're hosting the podcast where we need more than two terabytes a month to serve all the downloads so yes that costs more money so that money will go towards making sure people can download the podcast without it getting shut off when i was a young tyke getting into computers i didn't think there were two terabytes of data on earth yeah that's kind of wild yeah shall i read our first question please yes okay this comes from a listener named ricardo who says hello david jameson first of all thank you for the show i recently moved to a tech lead position and as such i will be asked by many people to provide feedback for performance reviews and promotions do you have any tips on how to provide good

feedback especially in the cases where you don't constantly work with the interested people Yeah, I mean, I think this is a classic situation to make money by peddling influence, right? Like, you use the model of politicians where you need a kickback. I see. You trade favors. Exactly. You say, hey, you've got a performance review coming up. What a coincidence, because I have a big hole where my yacht needs to go in the ocean.

there's an empty patch of water that i need to put a yacht in yeah this would be doubly dubious because putting a yacht in the ocean would cause the sea levels to rise just a little bit more by displacing the volume of the yacht so yeah you'll be corrupt you'll make money you'll destroy the environment just a little bit more just a little yeah i mean microns microns of sea level in greece i wonder okay i'm gonna go do that after the show i'm gonna figure out how much it would raise the C-level. This sounds like a question for Randall Munroe. Yeah, I bet he's got something in a book or comic about that.

He's probably written a whole book on it. And if not, we're coming for you, Randall. That's right, look out. Yeah, this is interesting. So I read the first half and got all gung-ho about, oh, how to deliver good feedback. Great, I've researched this a bunch and I have some ideas, but it's pretty specific about,

it's not giving feedback to those people, it's giving feedback about them to someone else. To a nameless, faceless committee of bureaucrats who are going to decide their fate. Yeah. I think there are ways you can do this wrong. You can, if you rubber stamp everybody and kind of sugarcoat everything, then I think you will probably lose credibility to this nameless, faceless committee. And even if it has a face and a name, then your shining approval means nothing, even

to the people who really deserve it, you know? And that's a tempting thing because it can feel, it's kind of a weighty responsibility to give feedback that potentially affects people's compensation and career path. So one way to get around that is say, yeah, just say like, everyone's great. Everything is fantastic. Everyone does great work. Yeah. Everyone should be promoted all together in lockstep.

Yes. And usually there are some resource constraints that make that impossible. So part of these committees roles are to allocate resources and they'll just kind of throw you out as a data point if that's what you do. I've always felt like finite resources is a real problem. I think we should probably switch to an infinite resource model. It would be much better. Yeah.

Then we all could get paid whatever we want. Yeah. And get promoted to whatever we want forever. Yeah. I mean, it's infinite. I mean, we could just get rid of pay too. If we have infinite resources, that's the Star Trek world, the post-scarcity world where it's not like you need money to buy stuff.

You just- Have stuff. You just have stuff. How will you peddle influence though? That's true. In a world of infinite resources, you can't trade favors for your yacht. Okay. I guess nevermind then.

yeah because you can just build it out what were you going to say about hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy have you ever read that that series i have i read the first book i haven't read all of them there's a subsequent book where they the earth decides to ship off all the people that are deemed unnecessary to some other planet and it's like the public telephone hygiene people who like spray the telephones to keep them clean and like middle managers and anyway they they ship them all off to another planet and the first thing they do is they realize there's lots of leaves so they declare that leaves are money and everyone's rich and you come to learn spoiler alert but you come to learn that these people are actually the ancestors of humanity and it's how earth was originally

populated the people that got shipped off yeah they got shipped off from some other planet they were like we don't need you and that's our grandparents my ancestors yes all right yeah so how do you go about it? Don't be too, I don't know, don't sugarcoat everything. What do you do? Yeah. Well, I think there's another really important thing that you need to do that's also not giving feedback, which is if you don't have enough data points on an individual to provide feedback, for example, for promotion criteria, it's okay to say, I don't have enough data to give this feedback and just abstain. Instead of like lying, just making stuff up. Well, yeah, I mean, instead of in an attempt to look informed, you might feel tempted to provide feedback that is not based on solid evidence.

Oh, just like personal interactions or like. Yeah, sure. Favorite sports team or. Yeah, exactly. Like you need to calibrate. If you like them or not. Yeah, exactly. like you need to calibrate your feedback and understand what it means in your company to meet

or not meet the criteria for promotion or raise or whatever it is you're assessing here. And I think it's perfectly acceptable to say I don't have it. Now, obviously, it's better to actually go and gather the data, right, and actually have the evidence. And you can do that. There are other ways we can talk later about how to do that. But in the absence of that data, it's very important to say I don't have the data rather than throwing something out. Yeah, it's like the person I think i've told this story on the show before but i was teaching interview skills to a workshop once probably seven or eight years ago and this one particular individual i did a mock interview invited him to the front of the classroom and i did a mock interview with him where i asked him

some technical questions and he did not know the answer but rather than saying i don't know he just started making stuff up and and i stopped him in the middle of his answer and i said okay it seems to me like you don't know the answer and he's like no i really don't and i'm like okay in the event that you don't know the answer it's okay to say i don't know it's much better than making stuff up in an interview context okay let's start again so i asked him another question and again he starts making stuff up because he didn't know the answer and i said it sounds like i stopped him in the middle of his answer i said it sounds like you're doing that thing again where you don't know the answer and you're making it up and he just buries his hands his head in his hands

and says i'm so sorry my previous career career was in public relations and we always have an answer in public relations so it's perfect yeah so don't be a public relations yes exactly i would say i mean this depends on the team a lot but i think a lack of any data is in it in some way a data point if if you are a tech lead of a person and you know literally nothing about what they have done yeah yeah i mean that kind of said if you if you're supposed to be working with them that kind of says something about at least their ability to communicate what they are getting done or maybe your ability to listen that's what i was gonna say maybe maybe they're saying it all the time maybe this is a data point on you yeah turns out i don't have feedback on anybody

the committee then have enough information i can see the committee members flipping to a new page and making a few notes and then flipping back it really gets in the way of my starcraft time to pay attention when other people tell me things so i don't have much data sorry yeah i like what you said about focusing on their on things that are related to promotion criteria it can be tempting when you are asked to give feedback on people to turn into kind of an armchair psychologist and say like well this person i don't know has an issue with authority and and so they kind of like you're trying to analyze them as a human and the company doesn't care like they don't care about their psychology they care about

their job performance yes and those things can affect job performance but probably you're not trained as a psychologist and probably you're wrong yeah even if you are trained as a psychologist well i don't know so so you need to make sure that the feedback you're giving is related to job performance so if you feel like this person is prickly you know like that's not great feedback to give because it's without context and it's unclear how it affects their job performance they could be prickly but they could be just getting tons of stuff done and and and kind of like work through it to collaborate well with people or they could be prickly and that causes them to not gather requirements correctly because no one wants to talk to them and then that's the

thing you get feedback on you say they don't gather requirements when they when they do their work and then if you want you can maybe say like it might be because they're prickly but but you kind of have to flip the order instead of say like here's who they are as a human you say here's what they did and how it affected the business right yeah i love that i love that and i like how you that last thing you said because that says to me you need to be sharing specific examples like i i think in the the case you're describing where you say they are not good at gathering requirements i don't think it's sufficient to just say they're not good at gathering requirements or they don't meet this yeah gathering requirements bar you have to give specific

examples like on project x there were three main requirements and they missed one of them because they failed to ask important questions and then that project went on to cause the company x problem right you know so situation task action result right star yeah have you heard of situation behavior impact no there's a i think it i think i read about it in oh gosh i can see the color of the cover that orange book radical candor the the book about being clear and giving feedback to each other but it's it's kind of a framework for giving feedback specifically like you mentioned where you describe the situation like here was the context here was the behavior that happened here was the impact that it caused and that helps you avoid this like well when they were a child they were

bullied in grade school and so they developed this personality trait and like i don't know that that fuzzy stuff that is important to us as human beings but sadly not important to rating performance on a job okay and and that that helps you provide context that the business cares about and make sure that your examples are specific that's that's a thing that you use when giving feedback directly to individuals as well and i guess we're saying feedback a lot and all it's probably telling that all of the examples we're mentioning are negative like feedback kind of has this negative connotation where yeah you you only give feedback when you're telling people they're in trouble, but that's not necessarily the case. And this applies just as

much to positive feedback instead of just saying like, you are great. That's very vague. That's useless. It's unclear. Yeah. It's unclear what that means. And how do you do more of you are great? Like how do other people do that? You know, this year I'm just really going to dial up the, you are great. That's what I'm going to do. Yeah. That's my goal. Yeah. Yeah. But if you can say in this situation, there was a tight deadline with lots of teams they had to communicate with they they really responded quickly and they got all these people in a room together and that led to the project being delivered successfully despite like previous failures or i don't know whatever the example is you know yeah like if you can do that for positive things

those carry more weight as well instead of just saying a real go-getter or whatever positive thing you want to say yeah i like that and in fact i guess we're kind of let's just drift a little bit outside the context of performance reviews and talk about giving feedback in general One of the things I like to do when giving feedback to others is start with what I appreciate about them and say, I appreciate when, and then fill in the blank. For example, I appreciate when you reached out to that other team to proactively head off this issue so that we didn't have a disaster. I appreciate when you call me out in meetings and ask poignant questions that I didn't think of about a design, you know, things like that. And then if you can, share specific instances of when this person did those things. And boy, that just works really well.

So a few years ago, I set up a feedback system at the company where I was director of engineering. And one of the questions were basically, you know, what do you appreciate about this person? What should they do more of? And then the second question was, you know, what growth suggestions do you have? And I was very surprised when literally 95% of the feedback that came back was things people appreciate about each other. and people would sit in their reviews reading all this peer feedback with me and they would just be overwhelmed with all the positive praise they were getting they were like i had no idea that people appreciated this about me this is fantastic and i expected these feedback sessions to go where

people would come into the room not knowing where they stood and come out with concrete ideas of where they could improve but in fact what actually happened was they would come into the room and they would leave just feeling appreciated and it was so great like it was really awesome and once in a rare while they would get like a piece of constructive criticism to say stop doing this or you need to work on that and that was fine too but it was literally like five percent of the time yeah that sounds like a happier kinder gentler performance review well that's the thing is we actually separated it from the performance review so this was just okay good pure feedback yeah so so it's yeah it's not like 95 positive things meets expectations

no yeah it was just a way for people to kind of put their finger on the pulse of how they're peers felt about them and what their strengths were. Yeah. I don't think I have more wisdom. I think I just have things to repeat. The more specific, the better. I have one more thing to talk about. In the context of a performance review, it's really important that your company has objective, crisp criteria for what it means to get whatever rating system that your company has, whether it's for promotions or just doing your annual performance review where you assign a rating to each person. It's very important that you have those. And when giving the feedback on an individual, you should be specifying your feedback in the context of those criteria. In

other words, don't go outside that criteria to say, well, you know, I also really like them for this reason, which you can do, but I think you need to re-evaluate the criteria if you find yourself needing to go outside of it. In other words, keep the criteria limited to what, or sorry keep the feedback limited to what the criteria say so that everybody is judged on the same level playing field yeah trying to make it i mean it's it's a fuzzy thing but you can make it fuzzier yeah exactly you're saying uh try try and make it more objective and less susceptible to bias yes exactly like personal feelings on the matter and and also maybe your company has crappy promotion criteria and crappy performance appraisal criteria yeah and maybe that's an opportunity for

you to step in and say, we need to make these more crisp. Yeah. Yeah. And then the last thing I would do is this is, this is kind of meta, but rather than, you know, collecting feedback on individuals, go to other people who have been involved in the process for longer than you and ask them for examples of feedback that they've given on individuals. And, you know, they can anonymize this and then you can calibrate your feedback based on what their feedback has been so that you're all giving the same kind of feedback. What do you mean? Well, so like you might think, okay, this particular achievement does not qualify for promotion for this person, right? But you don't actually know for sure if that's the case. And so it's good to talk to

other people who have been involved in these promotion assessments in the past and say, give me an example of an achievement that's at level X, right? Maybe X is the level you're considering someone for promotion into. And collect these examples so that you can calibrate in your own mind what constitutes a contribution that meets that criteria at that level. In other words calibrate yourself i think that makes sense you're trying to yeah calibrate and the way you calibrate is by is by looking at examples it's kind of like training a machine learning model where you give it a bunch of examples and then it can classify accurately you need that same kind of input fortunately you don't need a hundred thousand of them you just need maybe three you

know yeah this calibration process is actually built into the performance review method at my current employer where the managers will will give ratings and and feedback and then the managers all get together and make sure that i mean as much as possible that their ratings are using the same criteria and are kind of equally weighted so you don't end up on like the mean team where your manager is has has unrealistic expectations and people get worse than they should ratings or vice versa and i found that it could go really wrong but i've found that to actually be pretty useful and helpful to see kind of how the group as a whole determines these things. And when done in the right spirit, it's pretty collaborative and not kind of vicious and backbite-y like it could

be. Yeah. Yeah. So that could be built into the process. If it's not though, then yeah, it's useful, especially at the beginning to go off and do it yourself. Well, have we answered the question? Yeah, I think so. Good luck. This is a great new opportunity for you to see kind of the behind the scenes, the smoke-filled back rooms of performance appraisal. Not just see how the sausage is made but make the sausage yourself that's right all right good luck all right i'll read our next question this is from an anonymous listener hello guys thank you so much for the amazing content produced i really enjoy the show thanks for the laughs and the knowledge you're welcome thank you for saying nice things about us by the way we don't pick questions based

on whether you say nice things about us or not but we don't explicitly say we'll read it yeah we don't just like in the previous question you don't get a promotion based on whether you buy that person a yacht or not it just correlation is not causation that's right um anyways back to the question i have a back ends oh go ahead wait there actually is no question it's just compliments i'm a back-end software developer working on a multi-disciplinary team there's this other developer that really gets on my nerves to maintain my sanity i am asking to change teams and people keep asking me why i want to change should i tell my manager the real reason or is it better to say i want new challenges maybe my manager can solve the problem and no one else

leaves the team and then in parens i am not the first person to leave for this reason so i just watched this movie called the lighthouse and it's so good and it's on my brain and the movie is basically about two men that get stuck in a lighthouse together and go insane or start insane and reveal their insanity to each other so i'm i'm i'm imagining this it's like people talk in pirate vernacular lots of like bootleg alcohol okay i don't know weird shanty tunes that they start off singing happily and then start singing more and more crazed maybe some some weird lovecraftian things happening too so i i think what i can tell you is that the movie does not end well for either person so if this follows the movie

you might die which would be bad but you could you could retcon it i guess write your own version where what did you say red you sing retcon what is that you heard that no i don't actually know what the word stands for but i know what it means i think it's a like another couple words smushed together retcon is where you like retro retroactively kind of change the the past so for example in the new star wars movie i haven't seen any of the new ones but i read that the new one kind of retconned some stuff from the previous movie they just like waved their hands and said no that didn't happen this happened instead or like this person is this thing or okay okay i I found that stands for retroactive continuity.

Aha. Well, do that. Okay. I don't know. I think I really just wanted to talk about The Lighthouse because it's a good movie. Okay. I'm not sure how. They are not sponsoring the show, but honestly, they should.

Why just spill your beans? Oh, that's such a good movie. Okay. Should you tell your manager? I think people keep asking me why I want to change. What I would say if someone asked why I wanted to change is I'm excited by the opportunity on this other team. And what I would really mean is I'm excited by the opportunity to not work with this person anymore on this other team. But I wouldn't say, like, just got to get away from just so-and-so.

Like, their personal and code hygiene are both atrocious or whatever it is. What if you go to your manager and just completely flip the table and convince your manager that the new team is a good opportunity for this other person? Yeah, get them shipped off. Yeah, save your whole team the trouble. Yeah, and welcome another team to just a new exciting opportunity. There are no problems, just opportunities. That's right. There are only opportunities. yeah so the the main question seems like should i tell my manager why i'm leaving or not i think

you absolutely should especially if you're not the first person to leave the team like this is this is a rot in the team like the team is suffering no matter whose fault it is or what the underlying cause is the fact that now two people will have left the team because of conflict with this one person is a pretty big problem and if they're good they know this already but the manager yeah yeah the manager if the manager is good they they know this already even if they are good it will not be bad for you to tell them and it will give them more data than they have right now maybe they're inferring it but hearing it outright and if if they don't know then they need to know like the health of the team is one of the main responsibilities of the manager and

it's it's going poorly and yeah yeah this this has to be fixed yeah as a manager i would want to know and yeah if it's so bad that it's driving people away there's a good chance the manager actually does know and you would just be adding a data point and i could see people being worried about looking like um kind of the problem person right like i can't get along with this with this other person and maybe that reflects poorly on me but the fact that you're the second person to leave i think means it is not you yeah i mean maybe maybe there are things you could do to get along better and we could probably talk about that more later but but i i don't think this has a chance of blowing back on you as as uh oh anonymous just just couldn't get along they're a difficult person to

get along with right right but you do have to be super careful and i'm really glad to hear the question asker say should i tell my manager because i'm gonna assume it's off the table that you're talking to your co-workers about this and that would be something i would say definitely don't do don't go around talking about how bad this person is especially behind their back. But I do think it's smart to talk to your manager. And some of the words you can use in this conversation are, hey, I just want you to be aware of an issue that I think you as a manager need to know. And then describe some of the specific behaviors that are causing you to feel a need to move to a new team. In a way, this has parallels with the previous question, where if you

just say they're prickly, that's not very helpful. But if you can give specific situations and behaviors and impact like especially the impact well i mean the big impact is you leaving the team but there are presumably other impacts around projects failing or or maybe hires not joining or just other things that this is causing and in there have been a few occasions where i've been in this situation and really it helped me the first time i didn't do this and the second time i did i actually wrote down in bullet form each of the grievances that i had with a particular person's behavior. And it helped me to quantify the impact of each of their behavioral issues that I had. And some of them I just decided not to report at all because I realized, oh, you know,

in comparison to these other things, these are minor, you know, and I just wanted to pick like the top three big things this person does that need to be corrected. It might like devalue your main point if you include smaller annoyances. Exactly. It waters it down. And I think sometimes as human beings, we are tempted to paint the whole picture and be like, and they tap their pencil on their desk incessantly, you know? And it's like, well, that one, that one could probably just stay off the table. I found that you can have more impact influencing leadership to make organizational changes by just focusing on the, the highest priority items instead of saying, look how long this list is. You know, if you can just give like the most important thing

is more useful than saying there are 10 things. Yeah, no one's going to read 10 things. Are you kidding me? Nobody's got time for 10 things. Three things. Exactly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Another question in here is kind of lingering

is should I try to work with my manager to resolve this issue or should I bail? And I think that kind of depends on what your manager is planning on doing about it. If your manager is thinking about firing this person, which again, we have very little data, but it seems like it could be on the table if they're hard enough to work with or they're driving people away, then it might be worth sticking around if there's a timeline on that.

I also think it's unlikely your manager would say, I'm going to fire this person in the next two weeks, so that'd be hard to get. And having someone fired from the team has other negative effects too. I mean, even if it's for the best, it still is kind of a shock to the team. How do you decide whether it's worth it to kind of stick around and try and work through stuff? Well, I mean, if you have the conversation with your manager, like you said, it's very unlikely that they're going to give you specific discipline plans that they have for this person, but they might give you some hope that might convince you to stay where they might say, yeah, we are aware of this problem and I am actively working on it. And in some cases that might be enough for you to say, okay, good to know. You know, I'll give it another two months. yeah that's a good point it's not you should make it clear like if you do want to stay on the team you should make that clear but just say i can't and and help me help me understand if this is a good path forward for me should i should i be looking for another team or or do you think this

will be resolved soon yeah and if they talk about like you resolving with them that's probably a signal that they're not planning to fire this person right and that they're going to try and help you work through and then that's a i mean it's not that that won't work it's just that's a separate decision to make of like right how much do you want to work on this in these situations it is so important to be professional and i think the listener is already well on track for that but i just want to say it for everyone else's benefit the last thing you want to do is go around talking about how this person drove you away from the team and that you're quitting because of them oh man just so bad like there's just nothing good that can come of that kind of discussion

yeah again it's likely that they already know too if it's this bad yeah exactly like oh you too huh yeah yeah but it i'm i'm a terrible gossip i love the drama dave knows i don't know it can be tempting to feel like you you want to vent or get stuff off your chest or like have someone else share this pain with you and and in some ways that can help you cope with it how how do you get that if you're not talking to your co-worker about how horrible it is to work with this person yeah well i think you have to find someone outside the company to do that yeah like us yeah like call us yeah i'll just give you jameson's phone number okay actually that won't work because my phone automatically sends everything to voicemail if it's not on my contact list oh wow well you can

leave a voicemail for me if you can leave me a voicemail yeah jokes on you i never check my voicemail i pay more money for a phone that doesn't have the ability to call or receive phone calls i still feel like i don't have a firm idea of how to approach this like they're not going to get fired my manager wants to help us work through this together like how do i evaluate whether that's worth doing or not oh yeah yeah well i would say one mindset you can put yourself in is five years from now looking back on this situation what would you be more proud of leaving the team or another possible outcome is that you stick around and work it out and end up having a positive working relationship with this person and they grow and you grow well

there's a third too which is where you stick around and it doesn't improve and you're miserable like right you can't that is also a possibility but that one eventually turns into option one where you leave the team again right yeah and so i don't know maybe you've already tried to make it work but i can tell you that there is there was one instance in my career where i had someone that was difficult to work with and it was widely agreed upon by others that they were difficult to work with and i ended up i actually you know i don't i'm not always able to do this but in this case i was able to become pretty close friends with this person and work with them effectively on a couple of projects and i i just felt so good about that later as compared to some of the other

situations where it ended up where we had to part ways you know either the person left the company or i changed teams or whatever which has happened once or twice so i don't know like yeah i think that like you said jameson it could just be a recipe for misery to stick around but i think you need to weigh in the balance what you consider to be a, an outcome that you would look back on and be more happy with. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a cost to switching teams. You are working with a new group of people, probably a new context. You, you are probably losing some built up knowledge. There's also opportunities there though. I mean, maybe you like the kind of work they're doing more, but you're giving up projects that you're working on. So it probably depends on

how valuable staying on the team is for you. I personally would not weigh the kind of like character building, tell your grandchildren stories about your resilience aside as much as heavily as I think you are of like, boy, it was tough, but I really gutted it out. And now look at me, look at how gilded my rocking chair is. I can afford this. Thanks to staying on that team. I think I'd be more inclined to say like, get out, don't suffer. But if you really like the team and you're kind of agonizing over this and you're saying, I would hate to switch teams because of all these great things and I'm not even that pumped about being on this other team maybe maybe that kind of weighs into it more but if you're like I don't know kind of in the middle

or you would switch anyways then I would just get out I don't yeah I don't know I probably would too I've I've had some experiences where I was forced to work with people that I just really did not get along with just personality mismatches totally and when you are forced to work together you can sort of get stuff done but boy it sucks and and if I could choose I would choose to not do that yeah well all right have we answered it i think so i think it a lot depends on the individual and their own values so good luck solid maybe that is a solid maybe all right take you could take that maybe to the bank oh yeah you could bank it at the maybe bank yeah get a maybe equity loan on the value of that maybe

buy a yacht credits cheap make poor decisions go gambling off the equity and then get in deep to the equity loan sharks and yep to the i mean the maybe loan sharks right and then maybe they will come and break your legs that's right and then you'll have to go to the maybe black market then you'll go to the maybe emergency room maybe the show is over yes i think it is what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question where you can fill out our happy little form there feel free to give us as much identifying information or as little as you want we love it thank you so much to all those who have written in with questions we really appreciate it if you want to support the show

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