Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 270 (rerun of 227): Junior expectations and manager flakiness

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions What should I expect from a junior develop, and how can I help them grow? A junior developer joined my team of 4 a few months ago. He has learned things at a reasonable speed but it is still hard for him to implement new features without any help or existing code to copy. In past jobs, I usually gave juniors simple, easy tasks, but we don’t have that simple tasks in my current job because we’re working on complicated internal systems. Also other junior developers spent lots of their private time learning. I don’t think this junior has spent any time learning in his private time. I don’t want to ask them to learn in their private time, but I just can’t help feel annoyed about the fact that he still cannot pick up a well-defined task in our backlog and complete it by himself. I think he really needs to take some time learning some basics like networking and some skills like keyboard shortcuts of text editors. I know there is lots to learn. However, sometimes I lose my patience when I have to repeat myself. In addition to lack of knowledge and skills, I feel that he always waits somebody to tell him what to do and explain everything to him. I tried to tell him the whole picture of the project before explain a specific task, but I couldn’t see any improvement. What could I do to help him (or make myself feel better)? I’ve worked with 3 managers in the past 2 years at my first company and all of them seem to have trouble producing results from team meetings and one on ones. More specifically, my managers have mentioned things/events/changes they would plan to do with the team or me and several weeks/months go by and the idea is never mentioned again. At times it felt like maybe it was me that was unable to produce the outcomes of said ideas or that maybe I was some sort of a lost cause. However, my most recent manager doubled the ratio of ideas:results, so I don’t think it’s just me. For my one on ones, we have a long running list of things we talk about and even the trail there doesn’t seem to amount to anything. How do I hold my manager accountable for things they say or plan to do? How do I bring up these conversation on one-on-ones without making it seem like I’m the one managing them?

Hey, everybody. This is Dave. Today, we're bringing you a rerun of episode 227 about expectations on junior engineers and flaky managers. Hope you enjoy this rerun, and we'll get back to you next week with a new episode. It takes more than doctored get-blame screenshots to be a great engineer. This is episode 227 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 your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development have i ever doctored a screenshot no i i've like memed up a screenshot i put a bunch of like 100 emojis all over it yeah i show people that it was sick

but it was good this is the good part you know when you do a demo or something and you or you have a presentation and it's like you get to the the pinnacle and everyone's like silent that's why you have those 100 emojis yeah please clap yeah do you want to thank our patrons dave yes i'd like to thank those that have made contributions to get them a one-time shout out they are william jones fray dumasi tazahi ben artsy and those that are contributing at the level that gets them a weekly shout out they are oladapo fadiyi kajaran sveinsen ragnar hardison olexander microconfig.io nick travis sanders evgeny sladkowski dennis bogdanov braden kane steven armand lee john grant luke bayless philip john bazil the agile ventures charity sean and vin lock one day i'll

be able to say that whole list without taking a breath is that because you get better at breathing or because fewer people let's hope the first thing he said yeah if you join this illustrious crew then you will get an invite to our slack team you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon any amount of money that you contribute will get you an invite and it's great i learned stuff i meet people yep i have fun even one buck it's more than one dollar's worth of fun that i've had oh yeah for sure i would like to thank veteri for sponsoring this episode veteri is an online marketplace for you to find your next great software job you can go to veteri.com soft

skills to hear more or just wait about 15 minutes right do you want to read our first question oh no you don't there's a thing a different thing that's right i don't want to read our first question i do want to say something else yes uh it's that time of year where we host our annual utah js conference where i mc and last year jameson i did a live show during during the conference i don't know if you've heard about this jameson but there's this pandemic going on a few people have talked about it i don't know if you if you're aware i enjoy the freedom to wear a bandana over my face without anybody looking at me weird anymore so this year for the utah js conference we are doing a four-part conference talk series at lunch times in the

mountain time zone in october so feel free to go to conf.utahjs.com and you can sign up to do that you don't even have to fly to utah this year you can sit at your home and eat your sandwich while you watch talks online that i will be emceeing cool all right i will read our first question yes good job this is from a listener named the letter d what should i expect from a junior developer and how can i help them grow a junior developer joined my team of four a few months ago he has learned things at a reasonable speed but it is still hard for him to implement new features without help or existing code to copy in past jobs i usually gave juniors simple easy tasks but we don't have that those simple tasks in my current job because we're working on complicated internal

systems also other junior developers have spent lots of their private time learning i don't think this junior has spent any of their private time learning. I don't want to ask them to learn in their private time, but I can't help but feel annoyed about the fact that they still cannot pick up a well-defined task in our backlog and complete it by themselves. I think they really need to take some time learning some basics like networking and some skills like keyboard shortcuts of text editors. I know there's a lot to learn. However, sometimes I lose my patience when I have to repeat myself. In addition to the lack of knowledge and skills, I feel like they always wait for someone to tell them what to do and explain everything to them. I tried to tell

them the whole picture of the project before explaining a specific task, but I could not see any improvement. What could I do to help them or make myself feel better? Okay, this is the first time where I've felt like instead of saying quit your job, it sounds like you want to make them quit their job. What was that French word? Limoges? Limoges, yeah. Sounds like a job for Limoges. Yeah. Okay, so I just got to say right off the bat, I'm seeing so many red flags in this question. Oh, yeah? I don't know if you got the same impression, Jameson. Yeah, I was going to point out a couple. I even tried to tell the developer the whole picture of the project before a simple task but it didn't work yeah i told them how everything worked once and they

didn't get it yeah it takes me more than once to learn how how systems work i told them every detail of everything and i don't know what the problem is yeah any other weird things you see or not weird things i don't know concerns you have yeah i have some concerns so another red flag i'm seeing is that other junior developers spent their private time learning in order to be successful this one hasn't done that it should not be a prerequisite that to meet the bar you spend a bunch of your personal time learning about your complicated project so i feel two ways about that i feel like the industry would be worse off if that was the requirement but then when i think about well what would i want to do personally i feel like i would tell my past self to do that

you know like it shouldn't be a requirement it shouldn't be a gate that keeps people out if they don't have the free time i mean maybe they're doing child care maybe they have other responsibilities outside of work so they can't but at the same time it does make a difference it does and it's a proxy for passion which is this word that means like i like you you i think you will do good work like i i want to tell people yeah it's bad if your work requires it but then if someone is struggling at their job and they say like what should i do i can't keep up i would i don't know working really hard is is a is an answer sometimes yeah and i'm a i'm a huge hypocrite in this area because even though i say it shouldn't be required i every time i start a new job i totally put in

tons of hours to get up to speed oh absolutely yeah same same yeah i i don't think i've ever but especially when i really had to learn a bunch of new stuff ever kept it to 40 hours yeah oh yeah definitely not for me too but if you if you're just gonna flounder i mean yeah i don't want to live in a world where it's a requirement that you have to do it so another red flag i'm seeing here is and i'm reading between the lines a little bit here but the question asker says i tried to tell him the whole picture of the project before explaining a specific task but i couldn't see any improvement. And I think I'm reading between the lines because I'm assuming this was a verbal interaction. And the fact that this developer feels the need to verbally explain the whole

project to a new developer tells me that you either have no documentation or crappy documentation that new developers can use to ramp up at their own pace. So for people who don't process verbal communication as quickly or as completely as you do, this is going to be a huge impediment to them. Everything makes sense to me when I explain it to someone else. Yeah, it's so clear. The words, it just feels so good. I feel really smart that I know all these things that I can say. Yeah, it's hard to just listen to someone talk and then, for me at least, I have to play around with the system for a while and have personal experience with it before I can understand it very well. Okay, so I have a story about this.

So about 25 years ago, this is going to, okay, I guess I just dated myself by saying a number of years. But I played an online text-based game called Federation, and it had a somewhat complex economy where you had stocks and planets, and you could trade things and manufacture things and build factories and whatnot. And as you advanced through the game, it got more and more complicated. You had to manage a more complex economy with more moving parts. And I remember I was chatting with someone else who was playing the game, and I asked them how some of this stuff worked and they typed out just this huge wall of text explaining this very complicated system to me and then a few days later i was asking a question and this person got really upset with

me because he said i already told you all this yeah and i kind of feel like this developer here this junior developer who's like yes you did say all those words you did and yeah you know about 20 of them sunk in yeah you're like building up this this scaffold to hang new concepts on and the scaffold wasn't ready to hold all the weight of that's right project at once yet so it just fell off yeah i mean at the same time there are some folks who jump in as juniors and have the same level of experience and skill but are somehow able to just keep their head above water a bit more and keep up with new things and be more engaged and more proactive and i don't know some of that feels like personality or innate characteristics of people i don't know that

You can make a good environment. I don't know that you can force someone to change who they are, though. Yeah. So I think our advice is going to be focused on how you can make the environment better for junior people. But there could still be junior developers that aren't successful and don't work out. I don't know. Yeah. And that's the hard judgment call to make is distinguishing between people who are unable to keep up because they just really aren't qualified for this job.

or people who aren't able to keep up because your environment is bad for people who are otherwise qualified. And I think maybe what's happened here is that the first few junior developers who have been onboarded have been successful because they met the first criteria. They're qualified for the job. And they also have a good alignment on the way they consume information with the way that you're handing it out. And with this new person, this new junior developer, it's not really clear whether they're qualified for the job, but let's just assume they are. And given that assumption, it's possible that the way you're handing out information just doesn't work for them. And so that's why I think onboarding needs to have different modalities for people. You need

to make yourself available to answer questions verbally in real time, and you also need to have documentation. It's not like just creating a calendar event on their calendar every week for an hour with you is enough. It's also like just writing documentation is also not enough. But the combination of the two might allow a broader set of qualified developers to succeed. yeah places that are good for junior developers are usually good for everybody if your system is well documented and your processes make sense and it's easy to make changes and i mean that's gonna help everybody no matter their skill level so there's some investment that pays off to everybody where one of my teams right now is investing in improving deployments and the team is pretty

senior overall but one of the benefits is it saves senior people just as much time as it saves junior people right because it's it's the same amount of pain i guess maybe the senior people picked up the the painful process faster but it still is kind of laborious so i think you can you can justify some of these not just by helping the more junior folks but by making your team better as well for sure it's like the canary in the coal mine analogy wait how well so i guess i made an assumption there but that on your team it was a junior developer who called out the bad deployment process and the senior folks just were like whatever i can deal with this i mean it was kind of everybody for a long time and you just kept sweeping it under the rug like a good manager

yeah i just i just told him to suck it up and crack the whip and perfect but yeah i mean it definitely folks of all experience level had pain with it what about take some time learning some basics like networking so i wonder if i mean the field is just so broad there's so much to know yeah if you're junior you're you're gonna have gaps for sure but i wonder if it'd be worth putting together some sort of like curriculum or rubric or something some kind of syllabus where you say these are the skills that you'll need and you might not have all these but you need to be you need to be working towards developing strengthen them so if you're really good at linux but really bad at networking or something like that then maybe

focus there it's impossible to be good at linux and not good at networking yeah i guess maybe it's like just to get the desktop up and running you have to be a network admin the year of the linux desktop yes at last it's right it's actually the year of the linux network admin oh yeah but i get the feeling that there's some gaps between the junior developers skill set and what they need to be successful which is fine but it's like this surprise like oh you don't you don't know much about networking like you don't know i don't know http or tcp or whatever it is and and you should then you should probably be able to tell people that that's an expectation and and kind of point them towards stuff to help them learn it it's not that you

have to teach them everything about networking but you should at least be able to say hey networking is important for this job check out this textbook or something like that you know or maybe even ask them about it in the interview yeah i assumed that that's too much to ask well i mean if it if it's like a really important part of this job, then it stands to reason that you would want to hire candidates who have those skills. Yeah. But it's a junior developer, right? Like they hired a junior developer. So, so they're not going to be strong at everything that the job requires. That's my assumption anyways. Yeah. And that makes sense. Maybe then maybe the follow-up to my comment is maybe at this job, you shouldn't be hiring junior developers unless they have

unusually high levels of networking skills. Yeah. I don't know, but I like your idea of making a curriculum maybe a boot camp of sorts and where you say look over the next eight weeks you should be studying these topics and coming up to speed and here's some like exercises you can go through to learn them yeah and here's the section on keyboard shortcuts i like that i like that he slipped into keyboard shortcuts in there i mean it's a thing it is a thing but do you really think it's the keyboard shortcuts it's like he takes an extra 0.5 seconds to move that mouse over there is that really the thing that's making this developer we have so many questions about junior to senior and we finally answered it it's knowing your sublime text keys really well

i think it is sort of frivolous because you write code much slower typing is rarely the bottleneck you know like yes usually you're you're poking away at a line of code for like 20 minutes so it's not like not knowing a shortcut will will hurt you but there is something to say to be said for flow where if you can easily manipulate stuff then you can kind of like forget about that part of it and i found that it makes it easier for me to get into a flow state yeah it happens rarely for the record i'm being a huge hypocrite here too because i'm a huge proponent of keyboard shortcuts and like speedy navigation on the computer so yeah again i'm just being a hypocrite okay well i still like you but i think although i think what i what i'm hearing here is maybe a

little bit of bias in the question asker where they they sense like some slowness with the ability to use the computer in technical ways quickly and, you know, jump through tasks quickly and they maybe are getting overwhelmed. And maybe it's actually not keyboard shortcuts, but rather just a general unfamiliarity with a whole suite of tools that are important for this job.

And I get that impression. Like I've seen people struggle with the computer and I've often thought, well, maybe they're not a very good engineer, you know, but it's like, I don't know, like this could be orthogonal. Yeah. So I don't know.

Yeah, I've worked with people who are fantastic at solving problems. And if I have to pair with them, I need to like tape my mouth shut so that I don't yell out in frustration as I watch them hunt and peck for the right key to type or something. Okay. Well, have we answered the question? I think so.

I mean, I think that it's really good to do everything you can to make the environment conducive to success for people who don't come in with all the skills that you want or who come in with a junior level like this. And I think you may have hired some extraordinarily good junior developers in the past who have made this unnecessary for you. And if you're going to scale the team and continue to have like a nice, sustainable longevity, you're going to need this stuff that we've talked about,

a curriculum for onboarding. You're going to need good documentation. You know, you can't be there to answer all the questions for everyone forever. So it's a good thing to do anyway, and it probably would help this person. And if it doesn't, then maybe they're not the right fit for this team anyway.

Sure. 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 veteri without reversing a linked 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 and quitting your job check out veteri go to veteri.com soft skills to sign up that's v-e-t-t-e-r-y.com

soft skills if you use that link you will help support the show and if you get a job through veteri they will send you three hundred dollars thank you so much to veteri for sponsoring the show all right do you want to read our next question dave sure this comes from a listener named edgar who says i've worked with three managers in the past two years at my first company and all of them seem to have trouble producing results from team meetings and one-on-ones more specifically my managers have mentioned things slash events slash changes they would plan to do with the team or me and several weeks or months go by and their idea is never mentioned again at times it felt like maybe it was me that was unable to produce the outcomes of said ideas

or that maybe i was some sort of a lost cause however my most recent manager doubled the ratio of ideas to results so i don't think it's just me for my one-on-ones we have a long running list of things we talk about and even the trail there doesn't seem to amount to anything how do i hold my manager accountable for things they say or plan to do how do i bring up these conversations and one-on-ones without making it seem like i'm the one managing them great question i love that last question dagger to my heart is this you are you this manager i worry that i am so the core problem here is that it's really easy for a five minute meeting to generate like weeks of work yeah and coming up with an idea

that sounds good is great and then i add it to my list of stuff to do and then prioritize it and sometimes prioritizing means pushing that cool idea that sounded great way down at the bottom because a bunch of other stuff came up yeah especially if it's a thing that directly requires me to do i found that the the lowest ratio of ideas to results is when i say that's a great idea i will go do the thing then i don't because i do a different thing instead so yeah some of it might be sort of a time management issue with your manager or or a an ownership issue where they are trying to own all of the results from these ideas instead of doing the classic that sounds like a great idea why don't you go do that right you just suggest it yes i love that one i

love it too have you found that there are two categories of people when it comes to signing up for tasks like there's people who sign up for a task or in other words say i'll do that but who just don't really take it that seriously like it doesn't pester them or nag them until they get it done but then there's another class of people who when they say i'll do that their fingers are literally typing into their to-do list at this moment and they will be reviewing that to-do list like five times a day and give you status updates on it until it's done i'm going to say yes i have found there those two people are you just saying that to be nice i know which one i am which one are you yeah i say i say yes to too many things too which is a problem

because then i have to drop things that i've already said yes to so but do you do you feel this like sense of obligation to deliver on the things that you've agreed to do or are you just like well i'll put that on the pile and if i don't do it no one i'll never mention it to anyone and it'll be fine i think it's the worst of both worlds where i say yes and i feel a great sense of obligation and then i don't do it and pile up more stuff on top of it okay it like weighs on my soul still i would love to be the kind of carefree person i that sounds like the kind of person who has 20 000 unread emails yeah it does i want to be that person i'm guessing you have a pretty heavy soul right now yeah i think so it's like it's weighty a couple hundred pounds yeah i'm looking

at my to-do list from last week i was on vacation the week before but there's a bunch of stuff on there yeah so i'm the kind of person who when i agree to do something it's going on the to-do list and if i haven't done it by the time i agree to do it or close to it you'll be getting a message from me saying hey i haven't forgotten that thing you assigned me to do you know so i don't know say no to stuff yes in order to focus because that's that's the problem i have i can't there are lots of things that sound great to me and i say yes we should do that yeah it makes sense that i'm the one that should do that and then then my calendar explodes or yeah exactly exactly and we a couple of weeks ago we talked about this on the show where we talked about techniques for

saying no and as i recall you have a post-it note on your monitor that says something about says don't say yes right yep so the other one that says sit up straight fell off so my posture has gotten worse but the don't say yes post-it note is still going okay good that's a good one well going strong as in it's stuck to my monitor strong adhesion let's say yes yes it is tightly stuck awesome now i'll tell you that when a person like me who you know i only accept things i only accept tasks that i intend to deliver on and i take them very seriously and deliver on them it gets paired with a manager who's just an idea factory like this is a bad combination in my experience and if i have a manager that's just going to spam me with ideas 80 of which they

won't even remember but a hundred percent of which i am like feeling a huge obligation to deliver on that's a pretty problematic situation i think that i think that might be what's happening here except it's a little different because the manager is actually giving themselves tasks and not delivering on those yeah so yeah what would you do as as the person being managed by someone like this where you feel like they are committing to i think you have to figure out like what the magic incantation is that they say when they truly intend to commit to it and like sometimes i'll give an example of this but i had a customer back when i was in the defense industry and one of his famous phrases when he was getting us to commit to stuff was if we were sitting here

nodding our heads and saying yes to the things he was asking us to do he would look over us and say i don't see your pencils moving and what he and what he meant by that was i don't believe you're actually going to do this unless you're writing it down and that was that was our indication to him that we actually planned to do it because he's the kind of person that gave us a ton of stuff to do but when he said i don't see your pencils moving we knew he was serious and so that was our clue so i think with your manager you need to figure out like when he takes on tasks how do you know he's actually going to take them on and do them and i you know for this particular person it was that funny phrase but maybe your manager has something else like maybe they create

a calendar event maybe you see them typing it into their to-do list i've had managers like that where i would have a one-on-one with them and it would be away from their computer but when they actually signed up to do a task they would like lean over to their computer and type it in and i'd know oh that means it's going to get done yeah so that's that's sort of like planning for their prioritization strategy, I guess, where you just assume stuff is going to get dropped. Would you ever give feedback about this to your manager to say, hey, it seems like there's a lot of things you say you're going to do that never end up happening? I would probably not start with that. That's pretty aggressive. I would probably start with, hey, I want to make sure we have a good working

relationship. And I want to know, maybe this is just a passive aggressive version of the thing you said, but you could say, I want to know what it looks like when you're committing versus just idea aiding you know and brainstorming i'm just thinking yeah because i i feel very much like i identify with the manager in this question so i'm thinking of what i could do i mean i mentioned delegating as a way to solve this you can't make your manager delegate but you can offer to take some of these tasks on if you think these are really important and it seems kind of wishy-washy whether it'll get done or not you can you can just say hey i'd like to do that thing maybe and then it just becomes your problem depends on the task so now not only are you following up on the project

you're actually doing it yeah i mean again it depends on the task if it's stuff you can do that could be part of your job then maybe you should do it another thing you can do is when the idea of a task comes up you could say instead of letting your manager say i'll do that you could ask the manager a question and say who on the team would be best situated to do this and then that just kind of puts them in the mindset of delegation yeah maybe form a committee i think that'll really get stuff done yeah now i have two problems yeah form a council yes with subcommittees and committee chairs secret meetings so your answer to how do i hold my manager accountable is basically like you gotta only hold them accountable to the stuff that you think

they're actually going to do yeah and just sort of accept that things will get tossed out there that might not ever happen. Yeah, you have, I think you've had three big idea people in a row as managers. And you are a check the box person. And in my experience, most big idea people are not check the box people. Would you ever follow up about a specific task or a specific thing that was proposed or assigned to the manager? Yeah, and you might be surprised what you hear. I've had a situation where a manager gave a bunch of ideas or tasks to do. And then I dutifully wrote them all down. And then later I was following up on them and the manager said, who told you to do that? It was you. I never told you to do that. Oh, moron. Yeah. What idiot? And I may have been

guilty of that as well. You know, I've had people say to me, you know, I'm going to do X, Y, Z when I was the manager. And I've said, well, who told you to do that? And, you know, again, it was me. So I think as managers, maybe I'm going to reverse the question around and say, if you're a manager, it behooves you to be very clear about what you're committing to do and what you're asking others to do yeah i think it's fine to bring it up with your manager when it's a specific thing that's happened to me several times and i never felt attacked or or mad sometimes i felt guilty but yeah sometimes it was that there was information or i had done things i just hadn't shared it yet or did you ever feel so guilty that it impacted their performance review

they get an f because they made me feel bad yeah they asked me about the halloween party whatever yeah so there's there's a couple of ideas i wanted to share also which is there's this idea of being ruthless with your time and not letting other people take your time and being very deliberate about what you spend your time on at work and i think maybe these managers suffer from not being ruthless with their time because they just take these commitments and you know maybe start them maybe don't. And the other idea is in a world where we all have constrained amounts of time and other resources, but primarily time, we all know there's a limited amount of stuff we can get done in a week or two weeks or a month or whatever. And at my current company, we have

this idea of the line. And we use the word below the line, which means I have it on my list. It's below the line, which means it's not going to get any of my attention. And it would be good to get explicit with your manager in this situation to say, is this above the line or below the line for you. And basically above the line means I'm going to do it and commit to it. Below the line means it's a good idea, but it's not going to get my attention. And I think if you could clarify that with them and maybe use that as a term that you use to convey that information, it would be good. Because otherwise, if you don't have a term like below the line, above the line, it's just on the list or not on the list. And that kind of constrains what you're allowed to talk about.

So below the line is like, I don't want to make you feel bad by saying no, but no. right it also means later you know it's like yeah you might say my line is for this month or my line is for this week and it's below the line for this week but maybe it'll be above the line next week or next year or after you leave this company yeah that makes sense i like that there's a similar concept with a different name at my company it's called the cut list yes and there there is a line on it but there's a list and somewhere in the list is a cutoff where all the crap goes on the cutting room floor no just all the stuff that is below the line right that are good ideas that didn't make the cut not right now yep just like i was a pretty good basketball

player in middle school but didn't make the cut didn't make the cut that's right for the leap up to the freshman team yes that was aspirational i was like sixth grade this is i was really bad at basketball well have we answered the question i think so good luck this is a tough situation of course and we'd love to hear how this goes with your manager if you want to write back in yeah please let us know all right what can people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our form with our question information you can give us as little or as much information about yourself as you like social security number is optional just kidding it's not even allowed make sure you give us the

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