Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 200: Crazy work work stories

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

🎉🎉🎉 Celebrating 200 episodes! 🎉🎉🎉 In this special episode, Dave and Jamison share crazy work stories contributed by listeners to celebrate 200 episodes of Soft Skills Engineering Right out of graduate school I was in the process of interviewing and got through two phone interviews to get the final in-person interview at a location-based startup. The office was mostly sales but also had a small dev team. The in-house recruiter gave me a rough itinerary two days before: get there at 8AM, have four hour-long interviews with the team, then possibly a coding “quiz.” I was skeptical of what the quiz was but all she said was that everyone who got through the other interviews wouldn’t have a problem, it was multiple-choice, and it would take less than half an hour. I get to the office 20 minutes early but have to wait 45 minutes more for my first round of interviews because an internal meeting went over; the recruiter apologizes and asks if I want breakfast, and I say I’ll take something small like a bagel; she says okay and disappears from the room never to return with food. I get through the culture interviews just fine, though I thought it was a bit odd that several of my interviewers (including a VP) brought in their catered breakfast/lunch into the room but never offered me to get some and I had to go find my recruiter so I could get a cup of water between interviews. The final interview was with who would have been my boss: the senior engineering lead. She proceeds to ask me the normal bank of engineering questions and then lets me ask anything. She starts sending me the vibe that the engineering team isn’t really respected and that as a junior I’d be expected to put in overtime and be on-call on weekends without comp-time and without being able to have a say in when I would be on-call. Then I get some seemingly weird questions: Do you work well with loud noises? How noise canceling are your headphones usually? Is it okay that I would develop on a Windows machine? The engineering lead takes me to the recruiter’s office so I can wrap up the day but the recruiter had left early and nobody knew where she had gone so I was escorted to the front door by a receptionist and left. I didn’t hear back for a week and got a call late in the evening saying they had moved on with other candidates. A few days later I got an email from the engineering lead apologizing for my experience and that they were revising their hiring process due to my experience. Hi Dave and Jamison, I have a crazy work story to share for your 200th show! In my first role as a developer I was working for a small agency building websites for clients. One day I was uploading a new site, which involved FTPing into the server and doing all the config myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing, all of this terminal stuff was pretty alien to me at the time. For some reason or another I needed to change the permissions on the files for this site, so I uploaded it to the server and ran a chmod, (which was a brand new concept to me - luckily Stack Overflow had my back. OR DID IT?) Anyway, when I ran the command, my terminal went crazy and way more files went flying up the screen than I had for my website, so I thought ““that doesn’t look right””, hit ctrl-c and went to lunch, thinking I’d fix it later. When I got back from lunch, everyone was rushing about like headless chickens. Everything was down. When I enquired, it turned out that for some reason everyone was locked out of the entire server. After several hours it turned out that all of the permissions for every file on the server had been changed and nobody had any access to anything. Also, every client site had been brought down in the process. To make matters slightly worse, when I enquired about backups, it turned out that the main server WAS the backup server, because the main server died a couple of years before and nobody had bothered to fix or replace it. Whoops! I didn’t fess up - I was too scared - but coincidentally, a few days later I was fired. Oddly, during the firing, no mention of this incident was made and to this day I have no idea if the two were related. At the time I was devastated, I thought my career was over and I shed tears over how I was going to be able to provide for my family. However, in less than two weeks I was in a new role with a 25% pay increase, and my career has bloomed ever since. So 👍🏻 I guess! And here ends my tale. I hope you enjoyed it - it was devastating at the time, but now I can look back on it with both amusement and bemusement. Thanks for all of your work bringing this podcast to us for 200 weeks, I hope you continue until you also accidentally lock everyone out of your own servers. This is a crazy interview story. It was with a healthcare tech startup. The building was across the street from the healthcare tech company where my wife worked. After meeting the 9 people on the team and doing some white boarding, I met with the CEO. When he asked why I was excited to work at his company, I mentioned in passing that my wife worked at the company across the street. CEO then says “Oh, wow. They just announced that they are going public.” At this point, the company had not announced that they were going public yet, but my wife already knew about it and told me that it wouldn’t happen for a few months. I demurred, but the CEO pressed more “Yeah, I saw it on the news this morning.” Yep. The CEO of a company that rivals my wife’s was asking for insider trading information. I actually had to rehash my conversation to my wife’s boss to make sure I didn’t give away anything important (which I fortunately did not). After that, I decided I would never work for any company in the same industry as where my wife works. About 7 years ago I was looking for a side income. A fellow engineer I worked with told me that the park he spends his weekends at was looking for someone to build them a website, run some wires and a bunch of other IT odd jobs. I was interested so I made the drive down to the park which further confirmed my suspections of my co worker: it was a nudist facility. I sat in my car for a few minutes to consider my options and walked in. It’s weird how being the only clothed person in the room made me feel so awkwardly naked. I spoke to the owner, shared my resume, and my co worker showed up (naked) to vouch for me. I got the job but only under the condition i ““wore the uniform””. I agreed and worked there over the summer weekends for a few months doing everything in the buff. Being near the beginning of my career I wanted to put this on my resume, but didn’t want to expose the private parts of this job. I ended up listing it as ‘contracter’ with just a note: references available on request. The company I work at is a privately owned B-to-C e-commerce shopping platform. Over the past two years the non technical management has been trying to position themselves to be bought out. Their strategy has been to create a new layer of director level management and hire in candidates directly from FAANG with the specific intent of injecting “FAANG” culture into the company. I guess the thought is - if you want to be acquired from a player like FAANG, then become a mini FAANG. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been working out so well. The 💩hit the fan. The new director have absolute power, and as it goes, ““absolute power corrupts absolutely””. The new Director of Engineering did a culling of senior engineers and managers that raised any questions to initiatives proposed by the director (you know, healthy project analysis probing to make sure potential risks are considered). One day, 15 devs were let go. These were senior engineers with years of domain knowledge. Not surprisingly, the platform started to have issues. Payment processing integrations started going down, checkout processes needed maintenance - but… the domain knowledge was gone. In the usual “throw more people at the problem” approach, everyone was assigned pager duty, even for systems they didn’t know. The system got so bad that the director resorted to shutting off one of the major payment processing integrations since it couldn’t be fixed. This had repercussions of course, and we started losing completed checkout conversions. The rest of the senior engineers were leaving voluntarily at this point. Now that the ship was pretty much on fire, and the engineering department pretty much destroyed, we found out that the director was applying to another job at the new Twilio office in the city 😂. We found out he got rejected because his reputation had preceded him and the recruiters at Twilio had actually heard about the mayhem he was causing at our company. But it gets better! One of my coworkers thought it would be a funny prank to put a Twilio sticker on the director’s office window. Nope, my colleague was promptly fired. We later found out that the director was so pissed that he ended up going through the CCTV surveillance recordings to see which employees had entered the building early to find out who put the sticker on his office window 🤦🏻‍♂️. Had a manager who had transitioned to IT help-desk work from teaching elementary school and then worked their way up to manager over a large development team. They never let go of the elementary teacher mentality. The highlights were: Requiring multiple forced-fun team activities a year, like cubicle decoration contests. Playground level nick-names for everyone on the team. (Think banana-fo-fana level rhyming). All team members got emoji stress balls, and were required to place the ball that reflected their daily mood on the wall of the entrance of their workstation.

it takes more than hiding mistakes by rebasing your feature branch to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 200 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 i mean ego is not technical computers don't measure ego and rebasing my feature branch to hide my mistakes is a thing i do to hide my ego so i think that fits that's true i guess we are on topic yeah i some people have their their commits are like these perfectly formed diamonds it's like each one is is beautiful and atomic and leaves the program in a working state and has great documented commit messages and mine usually have one it starts off with a sentence

and then it turns into two words and then it turns into one word and then by the end they're emojis just like the devil emoji over and over and over again as I keep like hammering away at this stupid bug and you don't rebase those no I do I do I do rebase them okay good no one will know besides all the people that listen episode 200 100 100 100

yes this is a momentous occasion an illustrious milestone for our 100th episode we celebrated by cracking under the pressure of living up to a milestone and skipping directly from 99 to 101 it's true we've stepped up our game quite a bit we've we've increased in wisdom and knowledge and podcast skills for this special episode 200 we decided to collect wild work stories so instead of answering questions we'll be reading stories

about bonkers stuff that has happened to people yes i love that bonkers yeah nice this episode is brought to you by Vetteri which is a marketplace where employers and potential employees can connect and we'll tell you a little bit more about them later we want to thank our wonderful patrons thank you to Vinlok, Matthew Wojtowicz, Taras Haruk, Luke Baylis, Zach Granin, Luis Santos, Stanley Tactical Radio, Chris Hogan, Ivor Robotnik, Brayden Keynes, Philip, John Basile, Stephen Armanly, John Grant, Nick Cantor, Ted Nugent, the Agile Ventures Charity, Maple Syrup, Sonic the Hedgehog, Travis Dennis, Bogdanoff, Sean and Evgeny Sladkowski thank you so much to those people sponsoring at the level where we shout them out every week thank you to everyone

who has and who will in the future a future thanks to you if you donate any amount of money through patreon then you get invited to our slack team which is great you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on patreon to do so i just want to get into the stories yeah me too i'm gonna do it okay the first one is a repeat this is a story we have told before but we're gonna tell it again because it's great it's that good it's the bagel story yes right out of graduate school i was in the process of interviewing and got through two phone interviews to get to the final in-person interview at the location at a location-based startup the office was mostly sales but also had a small dev team the in-house recruiter gave me a rough itinerary two days

before get there at 8 a.m have a four hour long interview session with the team then possibly a coding quiz i was skeptical of what the quiz was but all she said was that everyone who got through either of the other interviews wouldn't have a problem it was multiple choice and it would take less than half an hour i got to the office 20 minutes early but had to wait 45 more minutes for my first round of interviews because of an internal meeting that went over the recruiter apologized and asked if i wanted breakfast i said i would take something small like a bagel she said okay and disappeared from the room never to return with food i got through the culture interviews just fine although i thought it was a bit odd that several of my interviewers including the vp

brought in their catered breakfast slash lunch into the room but never offered to get me some and i had to go find my recruiter so i could get a cup of water between interviews the final interview was with who would have been my boss the senior engineering lead she asked me about the normal bank of engineering questions and then let me ask anything she started sending me the vibe that the engineering team wasn't really respected and that as a junior i'd be expected to put in overtime and be on call on weekends without comp time and without being able to have a say in when i would be on call then i got some seemingly weird questions do i work well with loud noises how noise canceling are my headphones is it okay that i'd have to

develop on a windows machine the engineering lead took me to the recruiter's office so i could wrap up the day but the recruiter had left early and no one knew where she had gone presumably to find you the the finest bagel in the land only available at the top of an unclimbable mountain i was escorted to the front door by a receptionist and left i didn't hear back for a week and got a call late in the evening saying they had moved on with other candidates a few days later i got an email from the engineering lead apologizing for my experience and saying they were revising their hiring process due to my experience oh so so the person that got hired had a better experience thanks to you that's right doesn't that feel good they probably got a bagel yeah they probably did

i okay we've read this story before we've talked about it before a thing that sticks out in my mind is that the other folks interviewing you bringing in their food that was a challenge and the way that you passed the interview was you you take some of their food like you had to end the interview having some of their food in your stomach and lots of ways to that destination but that was one of the criteria i'm pretty sure i love how the questions are like do you mind working on a windows laptop and how do you do with really noisy environments yeah yeah like those are kind of two different things i guess they were like and how do you work on an empty stomach this job requires long hours with no time to get up and eat food

we're really tightening the belts yeah literally oh yeah yeah bring your own bagel to the interview that's the lesson that's that's the moral of the story you can never count on anyone else bring yeah i mean you have to show up like like you're going on a wilderness expedition i think that's the summary yes you have to bring not only your own food but the implements to produce your own food out of nature and noise canceling headphones well you dodged a bullet i think you did all right should we move on to our next bonkers work story please do okay this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi dave and jameson i have a crazy work story to share for your 200th show in my first role

as a developer i was working for a small agency building websites for clients one day i was uploading a new site which involved ftp into the server and doing all the coding myself i didn't really know what i was doing all of this terminal stuff was pretty alien to me at the time for some reason or another i needed to change the permissions on the files for this site so i uploaded it to the server and ran a chmod command which was a brand new concept to me luckily stack overflow had my back or did it anyway when i ran the command my terminal went crazy and way more files went flying up the screen than i had on my website so i thought that doesn't look right i hit ctrl c and went to lunch thinking i'd fix that later

we give some we'll give the computer some time to think about what it's done When I got back from lunch, everyone was rushing about like headless chickens. Everything was down. When I inquired, it turned out that for some reason, everyone was locked out of the entire server. After several hours, it turned out that all of the permissions for every file on the server had been changed, and nobody had any access to anything. Also, every client site had been brought down in the process. Oh, no.

To make matters slightly worse, when i inquired about backups it turned out that the main server was the backups because the main server had died a couple years before and nobody had bothered to replace it the backup has done its job it's like you used up a fire extinguisher yeah and we're like great like my fire extinguisher worked so glad we had that no need to ever replace it yeah we've hit our we've hit our one-time disaster quota so we're good now okay so that's not the end of the story i did not fess up i was too scared but coincidentally a few days later i was fired oddly oddly during the firing no mention of

this incident was made and to this day i have no idea if the two were related at the time i was devastated i thought my career was over and i shed tears over how i was going to be able to provide for my family however in less than two weeks i was in a new role with a 25 pay increase and my career has bloomed ever since and here ends my tale i hope you enjoyed it it was devastating at the time but now i can look back on it with both amusement and bemusement thanks for all of your work bringing this podcast to us for 200 weeks i hope you continue until you also accidentally lock everyone out of your own servers oh that is so good we depend on a lot of cloud infrastructure for this podcast so

if we locked everyone out of like the google drive server that would be impressive as far As far as I know, you can't see HMOD on the Google Drive. The big Google Drive. Oops, I put a star in there and now Google Drive is down. Oh my gosh, I love this. Yeah, this is brilliant on so many levels. It's so good. I just have to make a philosophical comment about the industry.

So here we have the most business-destroying engineering mistake for this company imaginable. And next job, 25% raise within two weeks. i mean there's a point to be made here about like the role of systems in protecting against human error and limiting the consequence of human error because the server was our backup i love it i love it ftp around and making changes to the config on the server brilliant yes live live ideal stack over i mean so and the other thing is it's not like this was 1999 when that was kind of the state of the art because Stack Overflow existed. That's right. So it's pretty new. Presumably there was an answer on Stack Overflow saying like, hey, you shouldn't orchestrate

your site by FTPing stuff. We should create a Stack Overflow story in honor of this situation. Should I put all of my websites on one FTP server with global write permissions for all developers? Yeah. And then we can all answer it and upvote the yes. It's like that jQuery question. Yeah. How do I add two numbers with JavaScript? Yeah. The answer is use jQuery. So there are all these orchestration frameworks like Salt and Ansible and Puppet and Chef and stuff.

And I think there's room for another one, which is the way you orchestrate your infrastructure and systems is it will randomly search Stack Overflow and run the code that it finds on there. So if you put like, I want to bring up a new MySQL server, then it'll just like copy paste run this arbitrary code on your server to hope it happens looking for investors now yes i don't need an idea guy clearly i am the idea

it's you oh that was a good one all right do you want to read our next story yeah i just i just want to luxuriate in the coincidental firing with no mention of the incident a few days later like i mean maybe it's possible that they were like we're just struggling to like we got to cut costs because this has really hurt us we lost clients just yeah we lost clients so we gotta we gotta lay some people off and we'll just lay off this junior developer i mean how how much do you want to bet that there's just the same company that had this level of rudimentary deployment processes had any way to trace back any one developer's actions to the developer i mean there's like bash history yeah but they were probably all logged in as root oh that's true yeah you'd have

to like recreate who's yeah yeah switch to root last and then assume it was them maybe some poor other person got fired yeah all right okay next story thank you this is from a listener named alex and it is an interview story it was with a health care tech startup the building was across the street from the health care from the health care tech company where my wife worked after meeting the nine people on the team and doing some whiteboarding i met with the ceo when he asked why i was excited to work at his company i mentioned in passing that my wife worked at the company across the street the ceo then said oh wow they just announced they're going public at this point the company had not announced that they were going public yet but my wife already knew about it and

told me that it wouldn't happen for a few months i demurred but the ceo pressed more yeah i saw it on the news this morning the ceo of a company that rivals my wife's was asking for insider trading information i actually had to rehash my conversation with my wife's boss to make sure or to my wife's boss to make sure i didn't give anything away that was important which fortunately i did not after that i decided i would never work for any company in the same industry as where my wife works oh wow i mean they didn't say whether they got the job or not yeah so maybe alex works there now and is like this was a mistake i'll never make the same mistake again oh man even though the ceo and i have become great friends since then yeah through our shared work experience

we've done many insider trading deals since then they're weighing on me yeah insider trading is so lucrative compared to outsider trading oh man yeah i've i recently did some outsider trading timed the market great because i put a bunch of money into it and then it promptly dropped like 15 so yeah if i if i could have found out from the coronavirus itself like hey i'm gonna really hit hard then i would have shorted everything instead and you'd be a millionaire now yeah i would to the moon i saw it on the news this morning i mean maybe there's like the secret if have you gone to like insider trading news.com or something to see if there's a some kind of secret service you can sign up for that gives you all the it's like a newsletter

yeah it's probably an exclusive club oh yeah that's what they the ceo means well nice all right if you've been a software developer at the same job for a few years it might be time to start looking around quit your job is our favorite advice but first you should probably find a new job trust me it is better this way check out a service called veteri which matches developers with employers based on what you want like your location salary requirements and technologies you want to work with i actually signed up myself and within a week they sent me an opportunity that looked really good my current approach to job seeking is tweet dumb stuff and hope the company notices me so this sounds like an improvement i think yeah once you sign up you get a consultant

to help you find opportunities i also like that veteri lets you specify your salary requirements early rather than going through the whole interview process only to find out want want your salary expectations were way off that actually happened to me in an interview Would have been nice to avoid that. You can start using Vetteri without reversing a link list on a whiteboard too. They don't have a coding test to sign up. If you are thinking about taking our advice, the soft skills engineering patented advice in quitting your job,

check out Vetteri. Go to vetteri.com slash soft skills to sign up. That's V-E-T-T-E-R-Y dot com slash soft skills. If you use that link, you will help support the show. And if you get a job through Vetteri, they will send you $300. Thank you so much to Vetteri for sponsoring the show. Shall I read our next one? Please do.

Okay. This comes from a listener named Jay, who says, About seven years ago, I was looking for a side income. A fellow engineer I worked with told me that the park he spends his weekends at was looking for someone to build them a website, to run some wires and a bunch of other IT odd jobs. I was interested, so I made the drive down to the park, which further confirmed my suspicions of my co-worker.

It was a nudist facility. i sat in my car for a few minutes to consider my options and then i walked in one of them was flea don't you realize you could have run it's weird how being the only clothed person in the room made me feel so awkward i spoke to the owner shared my resume and my co-worker showed up naked to vouch for me i got the job but only under the condition that i quote wore the uniform i agreed and worked there over the summer for weekends for a few months doing everything in the buff.

Being near the beginning of my career, I wanted to put this on my resume, but I didn't want to expose the private parts of this job. I ended up listing it as contractor with just a note, references available

on request. my goodness so nudism is a thing and like whatever that's your thing that's fine the thing i can't get over is the intersection of nudism with your normal work life where now every time you see your co-worker you have to know like i know you yes i know you in ways that these other co-workers do not like i would never in my life want to see any of my co-workers naked ever yeah that's wild wear the uniform so if you're running wires and other it odd jobs aren't there like physical dangers yeah of you're like crawling around and hooking stuff up and splicing things and i feel like you would want clothing to just protect you from getting poked yeah that's what i think maybe

it was like maybe it was an incentive to have really clean wiring or something okay listen you gotta mess with this stuff and no clothes on so it's it's got to be easy to work with so you you don't jab yourself in the thigh with a i don't know an ethernet cable on accident or something in your unclad thigh yeah oh man yeah website for a park yeah i don't know okay well you're a better person than i i think i would have not done this i just want to take a minute and relish in the pun at the end of this story where you didn't those private parts of the job yeah i wanted to put it on my resume oh that's the best that's so good you know i love a good pun and that one so good so i've been to nude beaches before and if if you're naive you might think like a nude

beach is the place where hot people go to get naked and it's not it's a place where regular people go to get naked so like even if you have this weird like kind of gross idea of oh it'll be titillating like it will not i can guarantee you it yeah this is interesting i i would not have done this so you have a story i would not have had i wonder if this uh facility was privately held okay i gotta read this next story okay get out of here let's get out of here all right this is from an anonymous listener the company i work at is a privately owned b2c e-commerce shopping platform over the past two years the non-technical management has been trying to position themselves to be bought out their strategy has been to create a new layer of

director level management and hiring in candidates directly from fang that's facebook amazon apple netflix google did i get that right yeah it's basically like big tech big silicon valley-ish tech companies okay with a specific intent of injecting fang culture into the company i guess the thought is if you want to be acquired from a player like a fang company then become a mini fang unfortunately it has not been working out so well the poop emoji hit the fan the new directors have absolute power and as the saying goes absolute power corrupts absolutely the new director of engineering did a calling of senior engineers and managers that had raised any questions to initiatives proposed by the director you know healthy project analysis probing to make

sure potential risks are considered one day 15 devs were let go these were senior engineers with years of domain knowledge oh so this is like anyone who questioned them yeah just gone yeah exactly yeah good good riddance who needs people that ask questions yeah not surprisingly the platform started to have issues payment processing integration started going down checkout processes needed maintenance but the domain knowledge was gone and the usual throw more people at the problem approach everyone was assigned pager duty even for systems they didn't know the system got so bad that the director resorted to shutting off one of the major payment processing integrations

since it couldn't be fixed. This had repercussions, of course, and we started losing completed checkout conversions. My head is exploding. Like there's a very fixed dollar amount, a very clear dollar amount attached to that. It's directly, it's like, hey, letting these people go caused this payment thing to fail,

which caused, oh boy. All right, well, we're halfway in. There's still more. The rest of the senior engineers were leaving voluntarily at this point now that the ship was pretty much on fire and the engineering department was pretty much destroyed we found out that the director was applying to another job at the new twilio office in the city we found out he got rejected because his reputation had preceded him and the recruiters at twilio had actually heard about the mayhem he was causing at our company but it gets better

one of my co-workers thought it would be a funny prank to put a twilio sticker on the director's office window nope my colleague was promptly fired oh he found out that the director was so pissed that he ended up going through the cctv surveillance recordings to see which employees had entered into the building early to find out who put the sticker on his office window oh yikes oh yikes oh man i've i've been watching the office again lately and i feel like hijinks are one of the sources for laying letting stress like kind of outlet and and they're not even letting the hijinks happen oh yeah i was just gonna say a mini fang is a weird like they're they're these giant multinational multi-billion dollars of revenue tens of

thousands of employees company and like we'll just become a mini version of one of those yeah right like that that that blows my mind like how you can't be a mini version of a of like apple like you can't just be like we'll be we'll be a tenth of apple yeah yep until they buy us and then we'll be apple it'll be great yeah perfect this is you know it's funny this is like the opposite of the story you typically hear where a manager comes in destroys the department and then gets golden handcuffs and then leaves and makes tons of money but this is like this is the story you want to hear right they came in destroyed the engineering department and then can't leave yeah it does put a different spin on all those golden handcuff stories because like

that sounds bad but the alternative might be worse at least they don't work there anymore like it's bad that they get rewarded for doing a crappy job but it's worse that they're trapped here now and they're not gonna leave and continue to do a crappy job yep yikes oh man this is like this is like spinning the roulette wheel and just losing so bad on the part of management here what do you mean well i think they were thinking let's just quickly hire up all of these employees from these big fang companies let's load them in here we'll quickly put you know posture ourselves to be bought out and then we'll get bought out and then we'll all retire on the beach but instead they just created a massive dumpster fire and they live in the dumpster yeah it's like they

had like a brief window where it could have all paid off yeah and they have passed through that window yep well it sounds like a bummer and the listener says the company i work at too so they still work oh man i'm sorry i'm glad you're there because it has produced this good story for us perhaps it is time to take the advice yes do the thing do the thing to quit your job all right do you want to read our last story yeah this is it our final story these are in no particular order by the way so okay here we go from an anonymous listener who writes i had a manager who had transitioned to it help desk work from teaching elementary school and then worked their way up to manager over a large development team they never let go of the elementary teacher mentality

the highlights were number one requiring multiple forced fun team activities a year like cubicle decoration contests sounds amazing number two playground level nicknames for everyone on the team think banana fana fo fana level rhyming and number three all team members got emoji stress balls and were required to place the ball that reflected their daily mood on the wall at the entrance of their workstation i love it i mean this sounds rad maybe it's not for you people people pay money for tools that let them record let let them record their daily mood too like i don't know it's just this is interesting everyone likes different stuff yeah cubicle decoration contest that sounds rad playground level nicknames i guess it depends on how mean

it is when i was a teenager and my friends were all mad at me they gave me the nickname of lamison i was hanging out too much with my girlfriend oh man yeah that's pretty mean now we have two children and oh i've been married for years so it was worth it it was worth it you made the right trade yeah i love this like i'm thinking what else does do elementary school teachers do that we could incorporate into corporate life recess oh yeah i'm on board with that go play in the tire swing i love the tire swing rich hickey has a talk about hammock time which is where you are wrestling with this hard problem and you go and do a different thing and his example is sitting a hammock you could go sit in the tire swing tire swing time yeah and then that lets your

subconscious crank away on the problem you come back it's solved thanks to the tire swing thank you thank you tire swing what about nap time it's amazing that's an elementary school thing right it's incredible yeah it is i don't some companies have nap rooms or nap pods or is it or is it like it's not supposed to be a nap room but people use it as a nap room i don't know like i've been up to places that have relaxation rooms and they have like a massage chair or like a i don't know it's just a quiet room with the lights turned off i don't know maybe they don't want to say nap room because yeah it would offend people somehow yeah i don't pay you to sleep but in a way you just did because i just took a nap yeah i don't know this sounds rad yeah i think

there's benefit in in people bringing previous experience into tech like tech can be a monoculture in some ways so and sometimes we can act like little children that skill set i mean your company if your company does your laundry for you makes breakfast lunch and dinner for you offers you massages drives you to and from work like yeah kind of live in that child life yeah what's a little nap time what's a little cubicle decoration i mean i i think we need more crossover that we celebrate things like when allegedly amazon i don't know 15 years ago hired a drill sergeant to come in and enforce the service breakup of all these monoliths what we need is to put macaroni around the edges of our monitors macaroni laptop covers yes did you

did you ever do those like macaroni picture frames or like pencil boxes or something glued onto the macaroni and then you spray paint it gold yes now it's golden macaroni i like it awesome well that is the end of our stories i believe that means that is the end of our episode thank you for sticking around for our 200th episode yes thank you for folks who have listened there are lots of people that have listened all the way from episode one the audio quality is really bad so maybe yes maybe skip number one yeah that was we were both in the same room we were so young we were yes so naive i know we knew so little yeah but thank you thanks for sticking with us please stick around for another 200 episodes when we will have it even more figured out

what can people do if they want their questions answered they go to soft skills.audio and click Ask a Question. We will get back to our normal question answering next episode. Catch you next week.