Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 27: Writing Great Resumes and Pushing Back on Non-Engineering Tasks

Episode Date: September 19, 2016

In episode 27, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: How do I write a great resume? Do you really need a resume these days? How important is formatting and good design? What content should be on your resume? Should I push back on non-engineering tasks like PowerPoint presentations? From listener samspot: I am a Sr. Developer and I am often asked to spend time on PowerPoint presentations for funding and other business stuff. I want to ask why the managers, analysts, etc can’t handle these tasks. I find them to be a frequent distraction from my actual responsibilities, especially because these are so frequently “emergency” requests. Should I push back on this work, or is it better to be a team player?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, episode 27. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. We're so excited to have you with us today. What's new in your world, Jameson? We are pumped. My wall behind me is orange, and it used to not be orange,

so I'm pretty excited about that. Did you just wake up one morning and... Just the paint gremlins. Did you call the cops? yeah i actually asked them to paint the wall and then they did it they were so helpful if you didn't know that you can just call you can call them and they'll just do like odd jobs around the house for you protect and serve yeah i knew they would get cats out of trees but painting your house that's great don't use 9-1-1 for that though that's a non-emergency for sure

yeah yeah well unless you have guests coming over oh no it's the big dinner with with the joneses that we have to impress quick all right this will be the death of us in the social circles it'll be a social murder oh gosh i'm glad that's not my life all right so we have a couple of great questions today uh jameson would you like to read the first one oh no my lack of preparation has been exposed there's a name in here hang on emilio surugo that's it okay apologies emilio from listener i apologize for james from listener emilio surugo how do i write a great resume how should an effective resume be written do the interviewers or hr people uh like an applicant with a beautifully designed pdf do they care about what i do for my evening activities etc

great question amelio so when was the last time you wrote a resume jameson uh certainly not for my last few jobs so you're a little you're a little rusty that's what i'm gathering i'm i'm an expert on this just like everything i so i guess for my my my cred on this i've reviewed many resumes nailed it i've i've read several hundred i don't know thousand hundred you're an armchair resume writer yeah so i i know what the experience is like on the other end as a person looking through them and having my eyes glaze over i'm in the same boat i i have not updated my resume since 2011 i think maybe 2010 and that's why you just haven't worked since then i've been unemployed for six years

because of that just kidding the so the the the witty subtext here is that uh to some extent resumes don't matter they certainly do in some cases though maybe we should talk about that when when does it matter because you can you can get to a place where no one will care about your resume i think it matters when you're not a software developer okay i'm just kidding very true i'm sorry i just was extending the joke uh so the the question emilio asks specifically do hr people uh think that it's an advantage if you have a beautifully designed pdf or do they care about your evening amusements and things like that um i do believe that emilio is onto something here with hr people because i think other engineers who are reading your resume are going to be a lot

less interested in your evening amusements and your like formatting and design of your resume but hr people might right i think that's possibly true jameson yeah but even larger than that sometimes hr people will have a say over your resume and sometimes they they won't so if you are applying at a large company where you don't know anybody and nobody's kind of recommending you or pushing you along the the hiring pipeline then most likely in the large company the people looking at your resume won't be tech people for the first pass um some some people or some companies might do it this way but there's generally some kind of screening where the hr people have a list of open positions and some keywords and then they just kind of match them

up and also they might check for spelling and does this is this written in crayon does this person uh seem like a crazy person or a non-crazy person so at at that point your formatting matters kind of matching matching what they're looking for matters a little bit uh but i would argue that is not a situation you want to be in when you're applying for jobs yeah i think what what you're saying kind of through the line reading between the lines there is that, uh, if you're applying for a job and you don't already have some kind of recommendation or in, you're probably at a disadvantage going into it. Yeah. I, I was doing just some rough calculations and I might've read, I don't know, like a thousand resumes at my previous job in

the past few years. And I believe we hired one person who came to us from a resume and that was our only contact with this person um we got maybe 50 to 100 kind of personal references or recommendations from existing employees and we probably hired 10 to 15 of those people so the at and at least at the company that i was at previously the the odds of just making it through the resume gauntlet are very low even if your resume is amazing uh you're still competing against people that have personal recommendations which pushes it puts you at a different level that's a good point so i i just remembered some crazy research that my data science team did about resumes because at my current company we actually have

access to hundreds of thousands of uh resumes and we have job hire outcomes let me let me give a disclaimer here dave is speaking officially for oh wait sorry i read that wrong all 100 personal opinions do not reflect the views of his employer but yeah that's true you do work at a place that kind of cares about resumes in the hiring process so we have three data scientists and they wanted to know how predictive is a resume to getting a candidate hired on the job and so we did our typical thing where we divided a pool of randomly selected candidates into halves one control group and one actual group and then we trained a machine learning model on bag of words and a few other features from resumes uh and uh we were actually able to develop a predictive model that would

predict like with i can't remember what the number was you know uh random prediction would be 50 50 you know higher no higher and i think we got it to like 60 40 from just resume in other words we could tip the scales uh of prediction to 60 chance of higher at least with that amount of confidence based on the content of a resume um which was kind of interesting so they are predictive of higher a little bit that's a pretty weak level of prediction though yeah um i mean like you said better than 50 50 but uh yeah definitely not super accurate oh yeah i mean we're not talking about like classification models that can take like an image and say it's a dog you know those are like 98 at this point or something they're like superhuman but yeah resume prediction was much

much lower yeah and this is all from memory i didn't even look up the research at all anyway is this publicly available i think so we've talked about it at some meetups and other presentations so okay yeah if not i'm probably gonna go to jail and i'm sorry i won't be able to do the podcast from my prison cell anymore hey mr warden can can i get a microphone in here we'll either put a link to it in the show notes or a link to the go fund me campaign for dave's legal defense for my bail so sorry no no that's fine so i feel like this is kind of the preamble which is that no matter what we say get a get personal um references get some contact even if it's just emailing someone with an at whatever company.com email address and just some contact to put you

in a different category than just the giant stack of resumes because that's yeah that's a really tough place to get through the other interesting thing is that most companies these days for software developers they don't have a giant stack of resumes sure google does and facebook does and other the big tech giants but most of most tech companies or companies where you would apply as a software developer they don't have mountains of resumes for software developer applicants you know when was last time you heard a software developer recruiter say oh man the hardest part of my job is sifting through all these resumes all these applicants to find the good ones right no the the hardest part is getting people to apply at all so suddenly

your resume isn't really a differentiator because they're just hoping people will apply for their job that's been my experience um i would say we definitely got applicants our impression of them which could be wrong but just from the resumes was they were on average pretty low quality but but we definitely had a shortage of of uh people that we were interested in hiring yes yeah i will totally agree with that based on my experience as well the uh yeah the one the people that we sought out and found and asked them to apply were generally of higher quality than people who just randomly showed up at our web on our web form and attach their resume yeah that's a thing that i think joel splalsky see i can't it's not just your name amelio it's any human being's name

i don't know how to say his name famous famous joel we'll call him that famous software blogger joel person uh he has a blog post about hiring and how just by definition the best engineers uh rarely are submitting resumes to jobs because they get recruited and pulled away by friends or recruiters or whatever yeah whereas the people that really struggle and get laid off a lot or have switched jobs all the time because because they're they're having problems those people submit tons of resumes because they're on the market more often so his his argument was that just opening up your job process to anyone to apply will yield more people uh that have problems doing good work than the kind of rock star engineers or whatever yeah um i don't know how true that is but it it

seems like some of his points kind of make sense i think so so um in my experience uh the most important thing you want on your resume is uh well i don't even know if this is true your name dave duh i killed him yep okay number two our two chief weapons the number two is uh like i don't even know if this is true jameson but i'm just gonna say it stupid freaking buzzwords something that a recruiter is likely to type in and find you with um because it turns out these resume your resume gets leaked basically all over the internet and there's all these different directories that host resumes and parse them and index them and if your resume says java and these people are looking for a java developer you're more likely to be found if you mention it so i

think it's important that you have the little buzzword section and sometimes i'll even label it this is the buzzword section no so that like normal engineers can just skip over that part and get to the part they care about so there's one thing yeah i think that makes sense um oh man it's so bad i'm just trying to think because i'm trying to think through resumes that i remember and i can't they just all blur together they all sound the same they look the same i mean there's there's super obvious advice like have correct grammar uh oh man this okay let i tell you what we're really struggling here let's just go to the exact question do they care about my evening amusements

i'm gonna say no no they don't no not important uh i have an engineer friend of mine who puts rock climbing and mountain biking on his resume and i and i've known him for 10 years and i said i don't think you i've ever heard of you rock climbing or mountain biking why did you put that in your resume and he goes someone told me i was supposed to look well rounded he's like i rock climbed once and i was like okay so no useless i don't think it's important but what's funny is that for everything we say here there's going to be someone somewhere that says no that's the most important part of the resume you know like if he didn't have mountain biking on that resume i would have never said yes to a hire yeah some company that believes

very strongly that their employees should be well-rounded and that they want resumes to reflect that yeah that's true so the meta advice is make a contact at the company you want to work and then it doesn't matter but uh figure out what their values are the other question is um a beautifully designed pdf and i would say this absolutely helps which is so funny because you do not need to be able to beautifully design a pdf to be a good software developer but people are just i don't know people like looking at pretty things i like looking at pretty things i was gonna say this doesn't help because uh it's it can be a little distracting like i find myself once in a rare while i get this amazingly beautifully designed pdf and you know what it says to me i care about

fluff isn't that weird that i that i get that message it's like that is why did this why did this person put in so much time to this like i just want the content and i want it to be easy to read now i guess there's a difference between beautifully designed well it sounds like you're talking about yeah ornately kind of distractingly designed yeah i guess i read i may have misread more into that question. But I think there's definitely something to be said for having a well-designed, good looking resume that is different from just the template you get in Word or whatever. Oh, really? See, I don't think I kind of would rather have everyone just follow the same template so I can jump to the information I care about. Really? Yeah. See, there you go.

Dave's advice in practice. I think it would help you stick out a little bit. It might. It might. When I'm reading a resume, I'm really just looking for a couple of things. The first one is how long have they been a full time developer. And this helps me set my expectations for when I interview them for what level of experience I should be interviewing for, you know, like, if someone's been working as a developer for 10 years, I'm going to expect a depth of knowledge that I'm not going to expect from someone who just got out of a boot camp last week, you know, and so I'm jumping for that information. I'm like, okay, trying to get a rough feel for how many years they've been working. And then the other thing I'm looking for is like, what kind of companies

that this person worked for? Is it, uh, stuff that's interesting and, and relevant to what I'm working on or looking for? Or is it, you know, is this kind of the kind of person who punches a clock every day or are they like central to the team? You know what? I just want to know a little bit about them. Um, I can find all that out in the interview, but sometimes it helps to know. You did mention what kind of companies do they work for? And I think that's fair to talk about that. There are companies that if you have them on your resume, just kind of a magical stamp that says interview this person uh for better for worse yeah so yeah basically the big tech companies you you you get this aura of competency just from having worked

there i i want to make sure we talk about what the point of a resume is because i don't think we ever said that and to me the point of a resume is to get you a job interview and that's that's its main purpose and that's a good point so everything that we're talking about here is is kind of how do i write a good resume so that i can get a job interview and then once you're in the interview there's a bunch of other stuff that i don't think is uh that related to your resume i think the resume like you said dave can be a source of topics to discuss but um if someone gets an interview and then they interview well but the resume is bad no one will care at all it won't matter at all yeah true good point uh is there anything else that you want to talk about

uh i don't think so i think we've basically said it's just not that important to have like a really great resume right is that kind of the crux of what we just said i think so that's how i feel let me give you an anecdote about this i recently went through a job interview cycle a couple of months ago. And I went through that whole thing with a five, they, the company had a five year old resume for me. It didn't even have my current employer on it. And I kept telling them, just go to my LinkedIn profile and use that instead. And then I realized after the interview, my LinkedIn profile was private. They couldn't even see it. So then I'm like, wow, I just did a whole interview cycle, got a job offer and they couldn't even see the last five years of my work history or even an

up-to-date resume and i thought huh i guess it really doesn't matter it doesn't matter that much yeah but you you're also the great and powerful dave smith yeah they were like oh dave smith oh my gosh let's usher you in through this secret side door and then and then i told them oh no i'm a different dave smith on wikipedia oh there's like 37 of you sorry i picked the world wrestling federation guy that's why they all looked so physically intimidated they were like yeah exactly man i didn't he doesn't look that strong but it says here that he body slammed somebody from the top rope so i guess i should be scared exactly then you tell him it's the cargo shorts those are the secret to your power one one more thing i want to talk about here is we've talked so

much about the role of personal recommendations and this does have some downsides i mean if you really want to work somewhere that you don't know any any people it's going to be a little tricky and and then your resume will take on larger importance but still just because you don't know someone now like get to know someone and that'll still be a lot better another wrinkle is if you only hire based on personal recommendations you can end up uh hiring a lot of people that look like the people that already work there which can lead to um some some pretty severe diversity problems not necessarily because people are discriminating it's just if you are a white male software engineer and a lot of your friends are white male software engineers and and you

kind of refer your friends you're you'll just by default refer people that are like the people you know and and uh so even though we've talked so much about personal recommendations i i wish it were different because it would have some advantages but that's just kind of the way of the world good point all right question answered question answered all right dave do you want to read the next question yeah sure this came in from a twitter uh listener named sam spot and he says i am a senior developer and i am often asked to spend time on powerpoint presentations for funding and other business stuff. I want to ask why the managers and analysts can't handle these tasks. I find them to be a frequent distraction from my actual

responsibilities, especially because these are so frequently, air quote, emergency requests. Should I push back on this work or is it better to be a team player? Thanks. Love the show. Now, I just assume that every question implicitly ends with thanks. Love the show. so uh thank you sam for making that explicit and also you're you're kind of demonstrating the etiquette right how's that like you should end with thanks love the show every time yeah yeah it's correct correct question asking jameson just beams the only other thing you can say is long time listener first time caller and then etiquette complete yep yep then you've done it uh have you ever asked your manager to do an emergency hot fix on prod

you could barter these things like i'll do your powerpoint presentation if you will fix if you go on call this weekend so i can sleep now that is a good idea fair trade um actually you don't want to do that because then you'll just have two problems hey i fixed that bug for you oh crap it turns out when i uh deleted all this stuff then the server stopped crashing emphasis on stopped it's way faster now too oh boy so the first thing i have written down here is your job is to help the business succeed balanced against your own personal satisfaction like in that order uh i don't know if there's

order but oh no they're on either side of a teeter-totter i think yeah basically like you you don't have to sacrifice your health or your family or whatever but but you are hired as a developer but really like you're a developer so you can help the business um make money or succeed or whatever their goal is so if there are other other things that you can do to help the business as long as it's within reason to me that doesn't seem horrible for them to ask of you yeah um i guess it gets down to efficiency issues where if there are other people that are way more efficient or if the fact that you're doing this instead of working on software things um ends up costing the the company more money then then maybe that's a problem or if you hate it too that's that's a big

problem yeah that goes back to the balance thing right yeah yeah yeah yeah that's a good point um if you hate it then then it will lower your personal satisfaction and you'll probably be bad at it too you'll be bad at it and you may even be bad at your other job which is writing code for the business right you're just fuming about all these powerpoints every time you write a semicolon yeah this semicolon reminds me of that powerpoint slide oh all these trigger words in your code yeah every everywhere you look you just see little little powerpoint slides dave i feel like you've done a lot of this stuff in your career is that right yes uh i have and um i feel like my career has been like a sawtooth function of moving toward like getting pulled

magnetically toward non-technical stuff and then having to course correct and like force myself back or force the business to let me go back to just purely technical and so like you consider like a sawtooth it's like uh it's like a ramp upward and then a and then a vertical drop back down to technical and then followed by another steady ramp upward and then a vertical drop and sometimes those vertical drops come from changing jobs and sometimes they come from just having a frank conversation with your leadership to say look i don't want to do this you know um well sometimes they come from a more subtle conversation like for example hey do you think it's good for me to spend about i don't know 20 hours a week working on powerpoint presentations

yeah and then somebody loses their mind like what exactly uh this is this is really visible to me right now as a as a freelancer where i'm i'm hourly and my hourly rate is the same no matter what i'm doing and sometimes i do stuff that isn't directly like typing code into a computer um but it's a lot easier for the business to balance like is it worth it when it directly costs them money to do it and and sometimes it is worth it because the context of that that's in my head means it would take longer for me to tell someone else that is a specialist to do that and then get it back to me and kind of coordinate that But sometimes that isn't worth it.

I've had the experience, not as a freelancer, but as just a regular employee, of this being actually quite beneficial for me to be able to get the full picture of how the business operates. back when I was a government contractor, it was probably about 10 years ago, I was frequently called upon to answer requests for proposals, write statements of work, and other things that are pretty business heavy, even though they do have a technical slant to them. And they took a lot of time. And I remember thinking to myself, if I had to do this for 50% of my time, I would definitely not want to do it. And then after a couple of years go by, I look back and I'm like, you know what, that was time well spent. And I definitely, it definitely helped my career in the sense that, you know, leadership

knew that I was a team player. And I think they compensated me as a result of that a little better. Because it's like, well, he doesn't just hide at his desk and write code. We can actually, you know, utilize him for more than just cranking out code. Like his code is great, but he can also do all this extra stuff, which is really cool. Yeah, yeah. But done well, this can multiply the effect you can have on a team and a company if you can communicate well and communicate well to non-technical people, which it sounds like these presentations are to non-technical people. Yeah, I think so. It sounds like it.

So if you don't hate it, if you're interested in leadership things, I agree that this can definitely help you. Um, if you just write code in, in a corner, uh, like we talked about last week, it's hard for people to notice that sometimes. And just the ability to tell people what's going on can, can mean that the technical work you do has a much larger impact. Now, I will say this about my other, my little story I was saying is that the other side of that coin is that while yes, it did help me to grow and make decent money and understand the business ultimately it did end to me it did result in me leaving that company it was a major

factor no like i'm serious like it was like a pretty it wasn't the only reason but i did eventually leave and the the main thing i was going to when i left that company was to have a more technically focused day job you know like i can come to work write a whole bunch of code feel great about new product that i'm building and not have to spend hours and hours digging through gigantic documents and stuff now this is oh go ahead i don't want to cut you off that's all train of thought has arrived in the station okay it's safe and sound did not get derailed good sometimes we have issues where i will throw i don't know what i do i explode the bridge that dave's train of thought is driving over and it's you choose right into the ground one of those like

old-timey uh detonators you know like t-shaped thing you press down uh-huh train of thought dead i think i just killed my own train no i got it i got it back okay so how do you prevent that as a teammate um so it's pretty clear what you did you were like well i can't do anything different here and i want to do something different so i'm gonna go get a different job uh shout out to soft skills engineering from from the past it's our go-to yep uh but what if what if you're a manager and i mean i bet your manager was kind of like surprised like oh see you dave i didn't i don't know did did your manager know that you were unhappy and you wanted to switch did you have teammates that knew was there something that could have changed to to

keep you there um i think this was the case where it was like they just didn't have the people to do those jobs um and i mean they had them maybe in some capacity but like i said it wasn't the only factor. And I think I, I don't remember if I had talked to them, but I think I had, it has been a long time now, but I think I had, I had given them a chance to try to change things up a little bit. Well, maybe instead of thinking about that specific case, I mean, what would you do in general if you are on a team or leading a team and you suspect this might be going on with someone? I am so much wiser now. Yes. So much wisdom. Indeed. what i would do now is first of all i would make it really clear to my leadership

how much time i'm actually spending on these things and when you do that exercise you may find that you've actually over quantified it in your own mind sometimes be like look when i average this out over six months it was only like an hour a week you know and even though it was a really painful hour you might you might realize it's no big deal or you might come to the opposite conclusion and say, hey, I'm actually spending a lot of time on this stuff. And my leadership needs to know that they're paying an engineer at engineering rates to do engineering, but not getting code out of this engineer or not getting product out of this engineer. And then tell your manager, just be like, look, I just want you to know, as my manager, you should know I'm spending

50% of my time doing PowerPoint slides with our fundraising team for the board or whatever it is. and make sure they're aware of it because at the end of the day if they continue to choose it that's very different from oh i just i didn't even realize that was happening you know because sometimes there'll be like 10 business people that all tap you on the shoulder independently but the business as a whole doesn't realize that they're all doing that you know yeah so awareness is number one that i would do yeah that's a great point and if if you are um a teammate of a person that this is happening to that's a great or or a manager of a person this is happening to then that's a great argument for like one-on-ones or stand-ups because then you get some exposure to

like hey today i'm gonna do whatever this business person tells me to do for this emergency meeting and it kind of illuminates it a little bit yeah absolutely and teammates can do a really good job of this like you may think oh i'm not a manager it's not my problem but sometimes management doesn't know. And there's weird dynamics that can happen to make it hard to tell a manager yourself. So if you see it in a teammate, I would pass it along. And I've got a little story about this. Please do. This has been quite a few years, but I just went to lunch with a teammate once and I asked him about something about his personal life. It was just, you know, peers talking. And it came out that he was actually pretty disgruntled by having been basically on call

for like two straight years like you had basically never been off off the on-call rotation and i was like i don't think our leaders know that and so i mentioned it to our leaders and they were like oh oh boy we need to fix that you know it for some reason it hadn't come up probably no fault of this engineers um sometimes these things just happen and you know nobody really realizes what's going on but you can raise that up so if you see one of your peers being buried by powerpoints it's a lot easier for you to go and be like hey you know fred's getting destroyed by all these powerpoints i just want you to know you know and sometimes that makes it easier for fred because now he doesn't have to go and be like i hate powerpoints you know that's how you feel sometimes

yep yeah that's a great point it can be easier to like defend your teammate than then for the teammate to feel like they're uh complaining maybe we should talk about the emergency part yeah definitely that sounds weird to me that you're getting emergency requests for powerpoints um what do you think about that dave i think that quarterly board meetings can just really sneak up i mean it's like christmas shopping right you know it's like i know it comes the same day every year yep but i'm still blindsided i organize a meetup it is the first thursday of every month and it has been for years and man sometimes that first thursday is is just real surprising sneaky it happened again shoot wait so are we are we defending the emergency status now on accident

yeah i think we are i think we switch to that don't don't make it an emergency yeah there uh if there are emergency funding meetings your business is probably like dying and that indicates scary things oh boy well i mean what else could it be it could be procrastination yeah it could be it could be someone else's emergency and then they are making it your emergency oh almost definitely that's the case here i'm gonna i'm just gonna guess that based on the air quotes yeah okay yeah that's true that communicates something oh yeah yeah and that's actually a good thing to ask your leadership about hey why was this an emergency you know and maybe there's a good answer for it but probably not you know and and maybe that would elevate this up to the

organization so that it can get introspective and say oh yeah we really should probably put in a put in place a plan to prepare for these quarterly board meetings or whatever it is that's causing these emergencies and you can help to raise that awareness i think sure and then and then as your reward you get invited to these meetings where you prepare powerpoint presentations now instead of a last minute emergency that takes a couple hours it'll take weeks yeah congratulations uh dave i know you you kind of wanted to talk about um how this can sort of happen to you on accident and what you can do about it so i think i think that sometimes when engineers get called upon to do this kind of stuff it can be a double-edged sword on the one hand it can propel

your career forward you can learn more about the business you can be a team player in a bigger way and get great recognition and that can all be good but also uh there are there are whole groups of people i think that get marginalized into doing things like this because they don't fit a certain stereotype or mold for a typical software engineer you know like oh yeah this person they uh they smile and they look at you in the eyes you know they should be doing more powerpoints and less coding you know suddenly you think that because they don't fit the mold of the geeked out nerdy their personal hygiene is just eerily good yeah they smell so great why are they writing code oh boy but like they know rules about fashion that you did not even know existed

so they clearly can't be an engineer right yeah and we have this stereotyping problem in our industry. And people who don't fit that stereotype sometimes get marginalized into roles that allow their technical skills to languish. And in those situations, it's very difficult because now you are up against a rock and a hard place. Because on the one hand, you want to be a team player, right? And on the other hand, you also want to be a great engineer. And so you risk um raising this issue and being seen as not a team player so honestly i don't think i have a great answer for how to cope with this but other than the nuclear option which we always talk about yeah you know change jobs find someone who will appreciate you and not marginalize you

if you have a leader that you really trust in the organization um and i mean this takes a lot of trust because it's a scary thing it's a scary position to put yourself in you could tell them i think i think i'm getting marginalized here you know and if you feel safe expressing that and you think the organization is healthy enough to be able to respond positively that's an option but it's hard yeah i i don't know what to do because uh i i i am through no fault of my own lucky enough to fit like the stereotype of an engineer i'm like a white dude with a beard right and it's the hygiene thing mostly yeah that has been a struggle for me having having coping with the the pushback i get on good hygiene uh we all have our burdens to bear but oh gosh no i'm just

kidding uh yeah this this isn't a problem i experience but i know other people experience it so i don't i don't want to sound like i'm giving advice because i i don't know i don't i don't know what it actually feels like uh i know um that i feel a responsibility as someone who who probably won't experience this kind of marginalization to to help out and if i i wonder if you can identify we talked about teammates being able to help out there if you can identify a teammate um that might even be a little easier than identifying a manager that you trust and and yes then you can kind of uh make a plan maybe together with that person but i don't know that yeah that so you find someone with really bad hygiene

thick thick rimmed glasses and have them go to bat for you yes the i'm only half joking i don't know for sure the plus 10 bo armor of developer charisma or whatever it is this is a case where I would love to hear from listeners who are developers who have been marginalized and hear what they did, because I think that much like the getting fired stories that we've had so many people share with us, I think this would be a great thing for people to share with each other. You know,

like I was marginalized in this way for these reasons and here's what I did to cope with it. I would love to hear those stories. Sure. Because I do believe it's a real problem in our industry. Oh, for sure. For sure it is.

And it, it it's really visible to the people that struggle with it and it can be kind of invisible to the people that fit the mold it absolutely can to the point that when people report this happening to them sometimes the people who do fit the mold say no that's not happening yeah like you're you're imagining oh this person would never do that i i know them they wouldn't do that kind of thing yeah they're nice yeah yeah it's it's tricky so the last thing i want to say on this topic is that it's a vicious cycle because once you get marginalized into doing non-technical stuff well guess what happens to your technical skills like they they weaken right like of course and so

then people are like well it's a good thing we had them do all those powerpoints because they're clearly not a good developer and it's like well you take any developer and make them do powerpoints for enough time and their brains will turn to mush anyway anyway so self-fulfilling prophecy yeah so we we talked about a lot of stuff here i think i i don't mind this kind of stuff that much as long as it feels like it's producing value and it's within reason i i get the impression dave that you don't hate it either yep um so in moderation yeah yeah in moderation it can kind of spice up the jira grind or whatever yeah some people totally hate it and you shouldn't have to do work that you just hate yeah so i guess just

be intentional about it like like all things with your career if you can think about what makes you happy and and what gets you towards your goals then you'll do better overall totally agreed that should go on a motivational poster without the without the stuttering part but that's the beauty of written text yeah the stutters get automatically edited out edit that up and then show it up on facebook and it'll be great all right jameson what can people do if they want to support our show it's actually not our show it's your show yeah how can you help yourself well there are a few ways you can go subscribe on itunes uh even if you don't listen on itunes it still puts us higher in these podcast rankings which directly correlates with um

you know how in the grinch his heart grows three sizes when he gets like a hug or something that's what happens to us every time someone subscribes and writes a review and gives a rating dave's heart grows three sizes because right now it's three sizes too small yep uh yeah it'll help other people find us it'll help it'll help us help you even more actually the fact is we we honestly don't know how it helps us but so many other podcasts say to do it that we think you should do it listen i hear npr podcasts say that and i trust those people yep they know what they're doing so i'll just blindly follow them and they're all rich yeah that's true they made all that money in public radio so that public radio money

oh it's that big public radio money yeah uh if you like the show you can share it with your friends you can uh tweet about it we've we've seen a lot of nice tweets about it um we are the the website is softskills.audio if you want to link to individual episodes or you want to give somebody a link to go find out about it um we would love to get more questions from you you can direct message us on twitter at softskillseng if you want to keep it secret or you can just add us on twitter if if you don't mind if it's a public question and um also we are looking for sponsors you are amazing and smart and handsome and brilliant and all the other good words and i think there's a great audience for people that sponsors might be interested in reaching so if

your company makes things that you want these smart people to know about or if you're hiring please get in touch and we'd love to talk about that well thanks for tuning in for another show and we'll catch you next week