Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 195: Ad-hoc promotion and quitting a huge company with Charity Majors

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

We’re excited to have special guest Charity Majors on the show! Charity is the CTO and former CEO of Honeycomb. She has worked at Second Life, Parse, Facebook, and more. She blogs at charity.wtf. Dave, Jamison, and Charity answer these questions: I’ve had the role of tech lead informally for the past two years at a fast-growing tech startup. We were a team of 6 developers, and now we are 16. Recently, we had a department meeting in which the Software Development VP communicated that we have 3 teams and I was the tech lead of two of them. I was surprised. He hasn’t mentioned his decision of splitting the teams nor that I’ve been officially promoted to tech lead. I was expecting a one-on-one where he would “pop the question”: Will you be my tech lead? I asked him privately if that meant I would be officially promoted and would have my title changed. He said that he was going to have this conversation with the HR Manager and would get back to me, but potentially. He doesn’t spend time on one-on-ones, nor is he very good at managing people although he’s good technically. How weird is this situation? A manager tells his team that they now have a tech lead along some org changes. I haven’t been informed, haven’t had my title changed yet, and haven’t been offered a raise yet. Hi! I love your show and have been listening to it almost since day one. I was an engineer for about 10 years, and I’ve been a manager for about 1 year, and I love my team. They’re high performers, we have a high level of trust. I also like my boss! But the larger org has some issues, and in time-honored Soft Skills Engineering tradition, I plan to quit. I would like to stay in management. So I have these questions: 1) My employer is a very large public company. How much should I care about negative headlines and Wall Street’s opinion? 2) How long should I stay in my role as a manager before looking for a new job? 3) How do I message this to my team when I leave?

it takes more than an irrational hatred of one kind of programming language to be a great engineer this is episode 195 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer all of your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development my friend bought a pickup truck in high school and he decided that when you buy a pickup truck you have to develop an arch enemy truck you just like randomly pick a different brand and and you hate that brand because it's your arch enemy brand and i feel like programmers do the same thing where like they pick a language for arbitrary vague reasons that they just hate and it's part of their

identity and they need like that calvin peeing on the programming language logo sticker that the people put on their trucks oh man which that thing can't be legal right like that's that's that's got to be a violation of copyright of some kind but oh for sure for sure whatever dave do you want to thank our wonderful patrons i do thanks to those that are contributing to get them a shout out every month on patreon they are brayden canes chris hogan dennis bogdanov ivo robotnik john grant louis santos luke bayless matthew voidovich nick cantor philip john basile the agile ventures charity sean sonic the hedgehog sunny tie stanley tactical radio steven armand lee taras haruk ted nugent maple syrup vinlock and zach grannon if you'd like to

support the show you may do so at softskills.audio click support us on patreon and if you do for any dollar amount greater than zero you will receive an invitation to our slack community slash workspace work work whatever it's called workspace slash cult did you say works place i did it's a play it's it's that was a combination of space and play because we play in that space work play yeah space okay yes yeah there are so many awesome conversations going on there every day we have well over 100 folks in there now and we would love to have you join us as well just as a reminder invitations go out the first week of every month when patreon bills you so for those that have been asking that's your answer awesome we also want to give a shout out to

Vetteri, who are our sponsors for this episode. Vetteri is a marketplace for helping you find awesome developer jobs, and we will talk more about them later. Yes, and we today have a very special guest with us, Charity Majors. Charity, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I've been sitting here trying not to laugh the whole time. I am the co-founder, CTO, and grumpy ex-CEO of honeycomb and i have worked as i've been on call since i was 17 and i've been an engineer and then a manager and an engineer again and then a manager and i've worked at facebook and parse and second life and now have my own thing and two jobs regrettable jobs where i was there for a year and a day and the biggest thing that i learned from that honestly is don't do that because like

i i started those jobs and within a day or two i knew that it didn't feel good but i felt like i owed it to them to be there for a year i didn't yeah it wasn't good for me it wasn't good for them i should have just fucking you you are in good company here i think you'll fit right in that's true one of the mottos of the show is quit your job i think it's amazing that you stumbled upon like our main tenant like 10 seconds into the show already so congratulations dude i swear every day i'm telling someone quit your job please quit your job all right i'm really glad to have you here. I feel like you're one of the most cited people on the on the show. I feel like I refer to your blog posts quite a bit. So it's terrifying. Yeah, so it's great to have you

here in person. I'm well, whatever in person means for this. It's really awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and read our first question. This is from a listener named Lucas. I've had the role of a tech lead informally for the past two years at a fast growing tech startup. We were a team of six developers and now we are 16. Recently, we had a department meeting in which the software development VP communicated that we have three teams and I was the tech lead of two of them. I was surprised he hasn't mentioned this decision of splitting the teams, nor that I'd been officially promoted to tech lead. I was expecting a one-on-one where he would pop the question, will you be my tech lead? I asked him privately

if that meant I would be officially promoted and would have my title changed. He said that he was going to have this conversation with the hr manager and would get back to me but potentially oh gosh okay i gotta make it through the question he doesn't spend time on one-on-ones nor is he very good at managing people although he's very good technically how weird is this situation the manager tells his team that they now have a tech lead among some other org changes i haven't been informed haven't had my title changed and haven't been given a raise yet how weird is this yeah the answer is sadly this is not this is not weird at all this happens every day in awkward tech land i'm gonna guess that this this writer is coming to startups for

the first time from a much larger company environment where they're expecting more structure around raises and promotion and stuff yes more structure more planning more more levels i i don't even know that this company has levels like most startups don't yeah well now they do now they have now they have two levels no they don't have levels they have a tech lead which is like a hat that you wear i guess they have three because they have a software development vp yeah there you go three levels yeah but but tech lead can be a thing that just moves around you know like the way at honeycomb we don't have any tech leads we have tech leads for projects and it's a different tech lead for every project and we move that hat around so that

everyone gets to practice leading and following how do you decide who gets it is it do people throw their hat in the ring do you do you evaluate mostly it's mostly you know emily the engineering manager director does a lot of routing and she's always she's very good at like you know catching that that edge where it's pushing someone but not overwhelming them and trying to load balance or you know this this doesn't scale forever but it was working really well for now and i mean honeycomb how big is honeycomb 20 30 we are 25 ish people and we we're like eight people writing code so it's it's roughly the same scale as this company too in terms of size of uh yeah but we are we are i consider us to be well ahead of the curve when it comes to

structure in part because we have a distributed team so i think when you're distributed you have to make things formal a lot sooner to provide structure for people and just like having been i'm also old and tired and i'm just like fuck it we're having levels you know because i don't i know future me is going to be real mad if we don't and i'm guessing that this vp has not yet experienced yeah i predict this vp in air quotes is like 25 or something and it was like the first technical first timer yeah and yeah yeah how weird is the situation yeah i i love how once they sat down to once lucas sat down to talk with him he was like hey so is this gonna get officially recognized ever and he said potentially like maybe that that's just a giveaway right that

the dude doesn't know hasn't thought about it at all and it's just now encountering this realization for the first time he's like i just gotta get this out of the way so i can get back to my full time job, which is writing code. Yeah. Yeah. Get all this tricky people stuff out of the way. Yeah, boy, that's that's a real stumper. Like I hadn't really thought about that yet. I haven't had my title. And like you did probably think that this is how you let people know about promotions. Yeah, it's got maximum impact to announce it in a meeting. Yeah. Well, no, it's probably it's probably the most efficient. Yeah, exactly. For sure. Everybody knows at once and a raise the raise is the warm glow you get by knowing that you have more

responsibility exactly i also love that he's a tech leading two projects like isn't that a problem yeah yeah that does sound like a lot sorry two teams tech leading two teams i are you supposed to be the tech lead of two teams that's that's a trick so yeah this is a lot of first time energy what what can lucas do so we've kind of established that it's yeah this is weird there's some weird stuff going on here like what does he do to kind of guide this to a better state so he needs to recognize he's in a position of needing to manage up and he also needs to be very flexible right like he's in a position where he can push his manager to do and think about things but you can't expect them him to have already shown up like having thought about things that

seem very basic to this person how do you do that do you just like drop hints leave leave books lying around like no i hate i hate hints i think that he should go you know we need to have a one on one regularly and then you know show up to the one-on-one with it with a list of questions don't expect to get answers until the next time but you know just just asking the right questions in a really patient way and being being realistic about what your needs are you know like do you think you can tech lead to two different teams ask him if this is a permanent thing or if it's a temporary thing you know all of the questions that we've just been asking ourselves here like he needs answers to those and i and i feel like you know he just needs to lower his expectations

and and try to approach it with a spirit of open curiosity yeah this is a fun story generator machine like that's that's where you are you're at a machine that will generate good stories We didn't even talk about the part where they went from one team to three teams in this meeting. Like, does he even know who's on his team or his teams? Right. Do they have any managers at all there? Yeah, they have one who manages two teams, sort of. And yeah, maybe he thinks Tech Lead is a manager too.

I don't know. Yeah, that's super unclear to me. It sounds to me like this so-called VP is the only manager, which is a very terrifying statement. Yeah. What about the race? If I was this engineer, I would also wonder where are the adults in this company? One would hope there are experienced managers somewhere. And you can go make friends with them, create allies, ask about where there are meetings, where a decision is taking place.

I feel like in engineering, we tend to look very inward as though we are the only source of potential good ideas. But in fact, there are many experienced professionals outside of engineering who have a lot of insight into situations. Yeah. Yeah. What about the raise thing? The other stuff around kind of managing up and getting some more clarity around what the expectations are for you. And even like the title thing, ultimately it costs the company nothing to give you a title. So I would expect that to happen. But the raise thing is kind of a sticking point where you are potentially doing more work and it should be recognized with more compensation. But how do you approach that? It seems like it

hasn't even occurred to your vp that hey maybe this should come with a raise you know i i was in this position at parse where i was told that i was a tech lead and there was no raise or title or anything associated with it and it never occurred to me that to even ask i was just like great recognition of my work that's what i wanted you know so i think that i don't think that this is so far outside the realm of being reasonable i do think that at startups you know everyone's acutely aware that it's cash-strapped and, you know, as you say, titles are cheap. But I

do wonder if he's being set up for success. Larding on these expectations, two teams, you're tech-leading, congratulations! But as you say, putting no skin in the game from the company indicates a lack of commitment to the outcome. So I don't know that having a raise would be a stickler for me,

but I would certainly use that as an opening question to help me understand what the expectations were. Really, to help his manager figure out what the expectations are, very Johnny on the spot. But is this an app that's expected to move around? Am I now managing these two teams? Am I managing one team? Is anyone managing these people?

Is this a project-based tech lead hat? There are just so many questions. And I feel like the, is there a raise involved, is an important answer, but not necessarily the only one. Okay. Okay. So in your mind, there's a possibility where a company could kind of have their act together and not give a raise as part of this move to moving someone into a tech lead role. There are other details here that make this seem an improbable scenario, like mainly the being a tech lead of two teams. Like that to me says that this is not a reasonable scenario. But a tech lead of one team, yeah, I do think so.

Yeah. Doesn't spend time on one-on-ones, nor is he very good at managing people. I'm just reading through the question again. And, like, is there hope for managing up to this person when he seems so disinterested in the craft of management? I would be asking myself seriously, like, what is it that I am in this company? Why am I working here? Do I really believe in the mission and the product? Do I really believe in the founders? Do I really believe in my peers?

Because it sounds like they've got a bunch of new grads and, like you say, like 24-year-olds. because by stepping into a position of leadership you are taking on a lot here like you're you're adventures in babysitting it's a story time generator which is the optimistic way of looking at this and it could be great for your career like god knows like careers have been built out of forged from lesser from lesser materials but you are going to have to be able to engage like your your creativity your curiosity your sense of humor and you know combined with lowering your expectations and just being like all right let's see where this rodeo goes you know because it's it's gonna be a mess it's gonna be a hot mess yeah there's there is something about like the the the

more of a leadership role you take on in a company the more i don't know how to put it like the more invested you need to be and it can feel bad if you don't want to be invested like it's a lot easier to take a paycheck as an individual contributor yes it is which is not bad like paychecks are good for life it turns out but but if you don't you're you're kind of lending your reputation in a way that you aren't as a individual developer exactly exactly and and like you could you could be like this is my challenge like this is my everest i'm gonna climb it and i'm gonna help make this you know this company great and in that case you kind of need to stop waiting for your vp to do things you need to like learn the the ancient skill of managing up right and and getting

him to do what what you need him to do and i i am the kind of nut job who often finds this kind of thing like exciting right the bigger the forest fire the more the more into it i am but like sometimes you're not in a place in your life where that's what you want to do or who you want to be or what you want to be associated with and and like being asked to step into a leadership role is a very clarifying moment, I think. Yeah, this is interesting. So it started off as a question about how do I handle this specific situation

around a potential promotion? And we've kind of ended up at, this is kind of a watershed moment for you at this company where you need to decide if you want to go through what will probably involve quite a bit of pain for reasons that make sense to you or if these warning signs are enough

to go move to somewhere that fits better with what you're looking for. This, this, this is also why, sorry. That's fine. Listen, as long as they're not coming for you, I believe that there's not much you can do to control them. This, this, this kind of question is, is the hesitation that I've often had about hiring people like from Google into my startup, right?

They come with so many expectations around structure and things that will be done for them and i'm not saying that those expectations are unreasonable but we're all here figuring the shit out for the first time you know and and sometimes those expectations can get a little grabby and and they just it's just like you know we have to ruthlessly prioritize what we care about in the given week to not go out of business and a lot of this hr stuff these are artifacts of a much bigger slower culture and that is all bad you know like we can laugh and rag on this all we want and it is certainly rich with humor and there are red flags like the fact that they just went from six developers to 16 you know there are red flags all over and yet like this can be really exciting you

get to you get to build things from the ground up you get to start with nothing and you get to see you get to fix all the mistakes that bothered you when you were coming up for the ranks you know yeah you get to make new and exciting mistakes exactly yeah time for your hubris to play out yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah it's it's it's an interesting situation well lucas i think we've clearly answered the question you know exactly what to do i believe good luck in this situation i really want to know what happens yeah please let me know yeah i'd love to know how this works out too hey jameson before we go on to our next question did you hear that one of our slack community members just got a new dev job with a $50,000 raise? Yeah, that was wild. They used a

service called Vetteri. Vetteri matches developers with employers based on what you want, like your location, salary requirements, and technologies you want to work with. Yeah, so I actually signed up myself, and within a week, they sent me a job opportunity. The hiring manager wrote me a very nice note, and the salary was actually amazing. I was pretty impressed. I don't know. I'm a pretty big fan of my current job search process, which is quitting my job and then asking strangers on Twitter if they know anyone hiring for COBOL. Okay. So once you sign up for Vetteri, you actually get a dedicated consultant assigned to help you tweak your profile and find the opportunities you're interested in. And the best part is you get those pesky salary requirements out of the

way early in the process. No more going through the whole interview process, only to find out that your expectations are way off. Another thing I like is that there's no coding test to get started. And as much as I love balancing binary trees on a whiteboard under time pressure, that's a pretty cool thing if you're thinking of taking the soft skills engineering advice of quitting your job you should check out veteri go to veteri.com soft skills to sign up that's v-e-t-t-e-r-y.com soft skills and if you use that link you'll help support the show and if you get a job through veteri you get 300 bucks thank you so much to veteri for sponsoring the show i will read our next question all right this one's from an anonymous listener hey there i love your show

and i've been listening to it almost since day one i was an engineer for about 10 years and i been a manager for about one year and I love my team. They're high performers. We have a high level of trust. I also like my boss, but the larger org has some issues. And in time-honored soft skills engineering tradition, I plan to quit. I would like to stay in management. So I have these questions. One, my employer is a large public company. How much should I care about negative headlines and Wall Street's opinion? Two, how long should I stay in my role as a manager before looking for a new job? Three, how do I message this to my team when I leave? So Charity, you have quit a very large public company with some pr issues yeah exactly did you look at all

about the at at those external indicators or were you more focused on your own experience it does not trickle down to the individual engineers it just doesn't it doesn't at all i do i do refer to the facebook bunny as blood money that is how i bought my house and my wife and i sold off the last of our blood money just the other month the other day and we were like God, I feel better about myself than existing in the world now. But when it comes to my career, it was an unqualified positive. For the first time in my life, I had this pedigree that I've never had before. Sure, where you just drop a resume on the table and you hear it thump.

Yeah, exactly. It's disgusting, but it's true. And everyone should have that experience once in their life. So yeah, you don't need to worry about that. It doesn't matter. What matters more than Wall Street's opinion is the tech industry's opinion of your employer's technology stack. You know how Capital One has this sterling reputation in the tech community as being the cutting edge for enterprise engineering. It doesn't matter what they do on the business side.

And I don't know what your company's reputation is, but if you don't know, that would be interesting to find out. In terms of that opening or shutting doors potentially to other opportunities, is that what you mean? Yeah. I mean, come on. Let's be real. like your your your motto is a good one quit your job because like we should have very high standards for our jobs because there is so much great opportunity out there like this is a golden age in tech you know there are so many people who need your skills like you and we should use this

we are the scarce resource i'm gonna pull her down i should like shift my class consciousness here but but like our labor is the scarcest resource on earth and and we need to use that as leverage to force people to do better like staying in a bad job just like gives a gives gives your blessing to everyone who's contributing to it being a bad job and that's not okay yeah we've we've talked before on the show about kind of the replacement level job and what it looks like if you just were to quit your job and like throw a dart at the wall and get an get get a random job and if you feel like your job is worse than the replacement level job yeah yeah you should totally quit walk now i do think this changes a little bit for managers for engineers yes you can change your

job every one to two years for your entire career and be just fine as a manager your effectiveness is tied much more to your understanding of the people and the politics and the landscape and that takes longer to level up in and i don't think as a manager you can job hop like that i think that it takes a good two years to really hit your stride and and since this is her first management job i i'm not that worried about you know his or her i don't know i'm gonna say her ability to find a new job because you know there's always gonna be some idiot who's gonna hire you but i do think that like a year in you haven't actually learned how to do the job yet and i think that you would possibly be better off staying for two years if you're optimizing for that i do think it's

important to have two years in a manager job before you actually your instincts are going to lead you in the right directions like just for starters and i do think that managers need to have longer jobs like as a manager you either are going back and forth between ic and manager or you're trying to climb the ladder right and if you're trying to climb the ladder then two years is a bare minimum right and i think that it's at least important to acknowledge this shift when you're when you're transitioning because it's so you would say that one year of experience is kind of like zero years of experience in a way where you'd be going up against people who who were you you new managers you know more you know more than you did for me at least though and for

most of the new managers that i've seen a year in they're probably doing an okay job but it's almost like there's there's there's a dip like they start out high and then there's a dip as they slowly realize yeah you're like oh no yeah yeah and they lose the the the sheen of their technical sharpness they're kind of using to like bridge over all of the gaps you know and suddenly everything there's a period there where it's very scary and if it's not scary you should be a little bit concerned that you aren't scared about the right things yeah you know because because it should be scary because what's happening is your body's at like physiological level you're having to relearn what cues to pay attention to and what means good and what means bad and and and what

what to focus on and and that just takes time and the bigger the org the more time it takes i think yeah that's very true especially yeah you mentioned a very large public company like you said a lot of the value of a manager is is their ability to kind of navigate those waters knowledge and that does take a long time. In my experience, it takes a long time to find like the one person to talk to out of this group of 500 people that can move something forward. And they make it look magical and simple and easy. But it's the relationship that they've built up over all that time that makes it easy. It's not something you can just step into and be effective as a new manager. So that's interesting, because so much of that is context dependent, like that all goes away

at a new company. So what do you bring with you? Good question. This is why I really think that getting a new job as a manager is is riven with faults what do you mean it is possible it is often hard it is harder in ways that are not like so much of the manager interview is about do i like you and these things that are very riddled with bias right and and as as much as we can hate on the engineering interview process because it's terrible and we should the manager interview processes worse and i do think that it's it can be easier to get hired as a manager and i don't think that's necessarily a good thing it means that you know less information about each other at the beginning of your relationship and you're just kind of diving off a cliff for these people

i i think that a sure way for somebody who is this close to their technical career at least is to go back to engineering and join as an engineer do a year as an engineer then you know but make it clear from the beginning that you're interested in getting back to management but that And that gives you that grounding in the technology and the stuff that gives you credibility where your strengths are before you're venturing out into, you know, where you're where you're still you're a year in. You're very junior as a manager. What about this last question? How do I message this to my team when I leave? Because that is a pretty unique part.

Just tell them. I mean, just like I have a new job. I wouldn't say anything in the meeting about, you know, whatever. I don't know. I mean, depending on how the dynamics are, you can tell them in the meeting or you can tell them one on one. Probably one on one is better. But, like, I don't understand why this would be hard. Do you?

I think the concern is there's more ownership over the team. So as an individual contributor, you're kind of leaving as a peer. And maybe they're concerned that it will cause people to react or reflect about the team as a whole and its health. And maybe this is like a... Well, it sounds like this place isn't rereading the question. Okay. They like their team and they like their boss. the larger org has some issues well it sounds to me like this is an island of sanity yeah and most

of those people should probably and and i say this with like this crushing weight of guilt because i've created this ocean of sanity in various unnamed publicly traded companies in the past and i regret it yeah i do i feel bad about the amount of time that i carved out time And for my team to work very hard on something that was immediately spun down after I left, their work was worth nothing. And I let it happen by staying there as long as I did. I was actually talking about this with a friend of mine. Like, you can have this idea of making a bubble of happiness and effectiveness in your team. And if you leave, does that bubble just pop right away?

And if so, is that a good use of your time? Yes. I mean, what's the alternative? of just just kind of i you know i i don't think these bubbles are good i think they can feel good for a while but ultimately like if you look at what motivates us right it's it's it's it's autonomy and it's mastery and it is meaning and you're creating this bubble by by creating a separate zone of meaning and it's fake it's not actually connected to the mission of the company and as soon as you go away the bubble goes away and that means that it's meaningless and and so like yeah

If you're just like, you know, maybe a bunch of parents drawing down fat paychecks and you're just like, cool, don't really give a shit, just want to be here, tinker, like have fun. Fine. But most of us, I think, want more than that. And I think that these bubbles of sanity more often are, they serve to insulate the org from having to make the hard choices that they need to make to fix their shit. Because they have these people who are padded, they're in padded rooms and they're happy and they shouldn't be. So it's like the manager is kind of papering over these problems so they don't bubble up to be solved systemically. Yeah, yes. But it's so satisfying to paper over problems and make a good environment. I know, I know. Because you get to like exercise agency, right? And you get to feel like a hero. Yeah, you get to look out over your bubble and say like, look how good this bubble is.

Look, exactly. You know, and maybe there's an argument to be made for this. if you really believe in the mission of the company and you really want to make it succeed despite all of the other dysfunctions. But most of those missions are pretty rare or at least they're not really that much better than companies who are doing better

with missions of about the same caliber. Yeah. So I think that most people stay at their jobs for two reasons. They have fear of interviews, which is real and legit and just needs to be practiced away. and and for the and for the love of the people around them it's like brothers in foxholes you

know like and and the and counterintuitively the more stress and pain your team has been together been through together the tighter those bonds are right like i come from ops our team has always been like the tightest team with the best culture just like the most we got your back bro you know like so much confusion that software engineers are just like what is going on and like swipe would cross your face to and then dive in exactly we're those kinds of teams right and that's not a good thing it comes from trauma and it's not okay and the older I get and the the more I see like the different sides of this industry the more I'm just like I regret that I do hmm so what should anonymous listener do then what's do we have a summary for them of how they should approach this

I would say if I was them, I would think seriously about what would I learn if I stayed here for one more year? And they don't say if they're planning on looking for a job as a manager or as an engineer, but it sounds like manager. Yeah, I think so. And I would spend some time talking to people in the industry about what manager interviews are like. And if I was them, I would consider entering as an engineer with the expectation to move to manager because I think that would be a better glide path for them. all of this stuff is like optimizing though like the heart wants what it wants whatever you want you can make it happen do it you'll learn your own lessons the awkward way it's fine but that's what i especially in this environment it's it's hard to make decisions that hurt you there's no

wrong choice right there's just like well i veered off a different side right now i got this weird scar tissue instead of this other weird scar yeah exactly yeah what what scar tissue do you want to embracing your life is a great question to ask ourselves yeah okay well i hope that helps anonymous again i really want to know how close charity honeycomb.io send me an email i would so speaking of that charity how can people i mean part of part of why we have you on here is for you to share your wonderful ideas with people part of it is very mercenary though it's like you you want do i get a slack invite sure heck yeah but like you you get something out of this too what do you want out of this do you want people to follow you on twitter to apply for i don't know use

honeycomb honestly i think twitter should i don't read twitter anymore i think you should accept my replies i i'm kind of in the flushing it in the toilet of life stage but i am nipsy tipsy on twitter and i do not have a lot of filters so if you enjoy that kind of train wreck you can follow me there my blog is charity.wtf and i have been trying to do an advice column there because there are these questions that get asked over and over. And I don't have a podcast. Your blog is great. It's really great. If you haven't checked it out, you totally should. I've learned a lot from reading it. And I've referred a bunch of people to it as well. Oh, thank you. I actually do have a podcast. It's the Observability Podcast.

Some strong advertisement for it. Right. Pumping my fist. And of course, if you have any observability problems, or if your software engineering team can't ship anything and wants to know why, you might want to check out honeycomb.io thank you so much for joining us it's been great this is super fun thank you so much for having me i've learned a lot and i i appreciate your time here if you want to send in your own questions to be answered then go to softskills.audio click ask a question and we will get to them before the heat death of the universe we will catch y'all next week