Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 314: "That guy" and how to skip level

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! Love the podcast and have been listening for a while. I have a question about dealing with “that guy” on the team. I’ve been through several teams throughout my career, and every once in a while, I get on a team where there’s always a “that guy” that everyone seems to tiptoe around. They’re the type that would yell and scream to have everything go their way, and they’re typically very blunt to anyone, saying things in a really hurtful way. These people can either be technical or on the product side, but I’ve found it really difficult to work with people like this. After working long enough with “that guy”, it seems the common thing people do is just to say “Oh, that’s just so-and-so.” or “That’s just the way so-and-so is.”, which I feel is the only thing you can do, but that just doesn’t sit right with me because it’s incredibly toxic. I don’t think the solution is to just fire people like this, but it boggles my mind how so many teams just let this kind of behavior happen because the manager can’t or won’t take any action other than give them a talking to, which seems to just allow the behavior to continue because there are no consequences. Have you ever dealt with situations like this? And if so, how do you normally handle it without just ignoring it? I am a senior FE engineer and I have recurring 1-1s with my skip level manager (manager of my manager) who is the Head of Engineering at the unicorn I work for. I usually ask what is top of mind for them (usually hiring), give feedback about my manager, and get additional feedback on bigger picture things I’m working on (e.g. we’re currently working on metrics to measure impact and value of our design system and other internal tooling). What else would you ask them to make the best use of this time?

it takes more than buying your manager two copies of mythical man month and telling them to read it twice as fast to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 314 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers of all sizes and shapes and man i just i could have sworn i would have had a mythical man month joke just ready to go but i don't have it what about a pie joke hey it's our pie episode yeah three one four i was not even thinking about that i have nothing prepared i have no speeches prepared i don't have any digits of pie memorized i couldn't tell you what the first digit is it's uh it's seven right just just double checking i'll look it up after the show

oh man well we hopefully you'll be able to look it up twice as fast with two googles i do have two keyboards plugged into the same computer right now which should help the secret to your productivity yes actually a friend at work inadvertently was not trying to convince me to but just convinced me by virtue of their presence and coolness to get one of those kinesis keyboards oh yes i have one and i hated it for the first day and now i love it oh nice yeah but i i do spell my name wrong a lot well temporarily until the autocorrect makes it spelled wrong another way yeah do we have to should we ruin the joke by explaining it is the mythical man month that's the source of what is it you can't have a baby in one month

with nine women or something like that yes that is i believe i don't know if that's the original you know the first time that was ever coined but that is one of the themes of the book adding more people to a late project makes it go later yeah that's right that's right which by the way that that is not true in my experience at certain sizes of teams like adding a second engineer to a team of one usually makes it go faster i think but it does break down so i don't know and truth be told i've actually never read the book mythical man month and i justify that because it came out before i was born so i couldn't see all the marketing material in real time you didn't get to experience the the marketing blitz that they put on yeah all those like tv

commercials that they ran yeah i accidentally stole that book from a computer science lab in my school oh yeah do you still have it yeah yes it's not james i borrowed it and then a decade later realized oh yeah this has the name of that lab written on it because i borrowed it to read one day and never brought it back it's never too late to do the right thing jameson and return that book i think i have to buy them several copies with interest now you'll show up in the late fees i'll be like oh dance comma jameson we've been waiting for you i'm about to retire off this late v yeah looks like we're getting a few new racks of servers for the old lab oh dave i want to tell you about revelo which is the best way to hire engineers for your team

but i won't tell you about them yet you'll have to wait till later in the show are they sponsoring this episode which is cool and you can go to revelo.com soft skills to hear more or just wait i want to thank our patrons who are supporting us at the level that they get a shout out and i also want to thank not thank several of you who took our challenge seriously in writing names when we said we would pronounce anything you write here it comes you'll know who you are when i get to your name all right we have one-time shout outs for antonio pitasi sonal moon jonathan cable and asal and a weekly shout out for nathan sack on memester josh owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice just andrew pollock jameson dance lan fair pool wait it says

that says damison jance oh did i read that wrong oh my gosh i read your name oh oh man i'm sorry i just offended someone so deeply by reading their name wrong what a crazy coincidence that someone was born damison jance in this world what a world okay damison jance oh man my my brain auto-corrected okay now on to the next name which is going to be a bit of a challenge here we go lan lan fair will gwingle grogery chwerin drob willant silo gaga gaga all right kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face you know emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org will oladapo fadi will angel nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant nick cantar and philip john basile

if you would like to have your name or sound or unpronounceable gibberish read aloud on the show every week all you have to do is go to soft skills audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you contribute a quantity sufficient enough we will debase ourselves on this show by saying whatever you type that is safe for work you've just performed my daughter's one of my daughter's favorite tricks which is she just mashes the keys on a keyboard and then says how do you say this dad and then just giggles uncontrollably when i when i make noises like what you just made oh you got through pretty well i'm impressed okay thank you thank you all right would you like to read our first question i do want to read it yeah this is

from an anonymous listener who says hi love the podcast and have been listening for a while i have a question about dealing with quote that guy on the team i've been through several teams throughout my career and every once in a while i get on a team where there's always a quote that guy that everyone seems to tiptoe around they're the type of person that would yell and scream to have everything go their way and they're typically very blunt to anyone saying things in a really hurtful way these people can either be technical or on the product side but i've found it really difficult to work with people like this after working long enough with quote that guy it seems the common thing people do is just say, oh, that's just so-and-so, or that's just the way

so-and-so is, which I feel is the only thing you can do, but doesn't sit right with me because it's incredibly toxic. I don't think the situation is to just fire people like this, but it boggles my mind how so many teams just let this kind of behavior happen because the manager can't or won't take any action other than giving them a talking to, which seems to just allow the behavior to continue because there are no consequences. Have you ever dealt with situations like this? And if so how do you normally handle it without just ignoring it hmm indeed every team has one right well every team sufficiently large i'm trying to think of how often i've been on a team with someone like this yeah i would say most of my jobs have had a that guy like around the job

somewhere in the team at one point they weren't there the whole time i was there because it it wasn't me i swear there wasn't a one-to-one mapping between my employment there and any that guy existing every team from the moment i was hired till the day i left had one of these but yeah i feel like yeah how do i say what i'm trying to say it's not it's common constant but it yeah it's common enough yeah i think i'm just saying i agree with you using a lot of words to say it yeah i like that the more words the better it means i really agree with you i don't think the solution is to just fire people like this is it though i mean could that be a solution have you ever seen that happen i have seen that guy get fired and i've seen that guy

not get fired have you seen that guy get fired because he's that guy yeah or was it like it's they had to find some other reason i have seen both situations i've seen are we gonna have to define that guy at some point i feel weird just saying it over and over again i've seen someone get fired for this and i've seen someone be part of layoffs when laughs had to happen and and they were deliberately part of layoffs because they were that guy right and i've also seen them just like stick around and then leave with their own accord eventually yeah yeah well i i have kind of a theory about this. And every time I posit a theory like this, I first scan my history that I can remember to see if I'm actually contradicting myself. And there's a good chance I am here, but

I'm going to say having someone like this on your team is actually a failure of management. And I think the reason it's a failure of management is because it is really, really hard to deal with people like this both as a teammate and as their manager have you heard of the market for lemons oh i i have heard of it in the context of a certain public schools i don't know if it's a different context though i don't know what you're talking about why don't you what do you mean i tell you what we have two choices here i i could sit here and guess a few more times which i think would be great or if you prefer we could do we could you could just tell me i'm gonna engage in the time honor tradition of poorly incorrectly summarizing something i read

a while ago and then looking it up and seeing if i was right my understanding of the market for lemons is it's a paper that came out a while ago that posited basically that so a lemon is another name for a car that isn't great like it's got some some issues and they are the the paper is arguing that if you are buying a random used car it's much more likely than you would expect that the car for sale is a lemon and if i understand right it's basically because you're more likely to sell a car if it's a lemon like the the good cars aren't gonna get rid of it as much yeah because people keep them so there's like a serve up there's a it's kind of like a survivorship bias yeah yeah like the the the quality of stuff on the market isn't the same as the quality of

stuff out there in general i guess is the way yeah yeah yeah yeah got it this in my head somehow related to this situation and i'm trying to remember how i i think the way i'm relating it is is that guys that are that are at work still are like they're good enough to not get fired most of the time which means the only that guys you work with are like the tricky ones where the really bad ones yeah like if it's if it's really obvious like clearly so hard to work with such that it doesn't matter how good they are then they're gone or if they're just not good at all and they're pretty hard to work with then they're gone so the ones that stick around are the ones where like it is hard because yes other is that i think this is like the opposite of the

market for limits it is but it's it's just it's another kind of survivorship bias like you are more likely to encounter people at work who are particularly tricky because the the ones that pick up desks and throw them across the room get fired the ones that are incompetent get fired but the ones that are just competent enough but also just rude enough but like just below the line you know are the ones that stick around yeah so they tend to be on your team i i think that's where i was going and thank you for taking me there and so here we have a very uh interesting explanation that in no way helps our listener oh it's classic i don't know it gave me an idea for a blog post yeah so obviously it has value yeah now you know why you're in this situation so

question answered yep now you know glad i could help grand unifying theory of that guy glad i could help i don't think the solution is just fire people like this yeah it um if there is some kind of like efficient market stuff going on here where you're sort of, I'm sort of assuming, yeah, if the solution was to fire them, they would have been fired already. And it kind of removes the fact that there's a decision somewhere that someone can be good at making or not. But I think the point is that it is not going to be easy to resolve. Otherwise it'd be resolved already. One thing I have seen work with this is, yeah, I've seen this resolved successfully in in two ways one way is basically the team or people on the team surface the cost that that

guy is having to the team in a way that the manager did not understand or was unwilling to consider before and leads them to decide that this person needs to go and then the other is the the manager puts in a lot of work to coach and train that guy and and help them change their behavior enough so that it it they're they're kind of that guy now i haven't seen anyone totally turn it around to go just a delight to work with for for everyone but i have seen behavior improve i have really i've seen it yeah one time no one knows what happened do you know what happened no i don't know what happened either i just know that there was someone who alternated you know every month it was alternating between should we fire this person

or should we promote this person? Because it's like they were either saving the team or destroying the team every other month for like a couple of years, failure on my part to not resolve that. And one day just turned it around and it's now just an absolute delight. And the team, this is a long time ago,

but the team universally loves this person and is so glad to have them on their team. And I hear this from unbiased sources who would tell me the truth. And so it's just this mystery of the universe. No one knows what happened. it feels like there was a like a paranormal experience i know right of some kind like like a ghost of jobs past charles dickens type of thing yeah like exactly the the ghost shows you

what your performance review looks like at the end of your life yes the spirit the performance review at the end of your life yeah and it shows you your future peers yes oh man yeah the ghost of performance reviews past present and future each visit you in turn yeah but that is what that is what it seemed like it was just this mystery and i think i think helping people like this is actually very challenging you know because they the people who are willing to mistreat others have a certain level they lack a certain level of awareness i think that awareness or empathy or something it's hard i think it's hard for me to put a pin on as a non-psychologist i mean i'm a space psychologist so this is a little bit

outside my wheelhouse if that guy were a celestial body yeah some kind we could talk all day you'd be on top of yeah yeah no problem you could talk all day about the the mental state of this comet right oh yeah i won't i won't bore you with that now but yes obviously well it wouldn't be boring it'd be awesome but we just can't so we'll move on it's just yeah it's too off-brand so anyway back to back to terrestrial matters i do believe that it's hard to coach people like this because they lack awareness about what they're doing and asking someone to change something that they're not aware they're doing is like extremely challenging you know and so it takes a lot of work on the part of the manager to say okay i've collected 74 examples i hope these all you

know i hope these can help you get us start to identify the pattern yeah it is just i mean notice we're talking about what to do as a manager right this is i have i have no idea what i would do resolve it besides bring it up to my manager as a peer of that guy. Because it's not totally in your control. You can give feedback on the effect it's having on you and what you think the effect is on the team. I mean, you got to pass it off to someone else to deal with. Let's see. I'm reading through. Teams just let this behavior happen because the manager can't or won't take any action besides a talking to. What actions do you think there are besides a talking to to do? So let's, you know, regardless of whether you're in a management role or in an individual contributor role, I think isolating this person so that their scope of impact is reduced is really helpful.

So put them on projects where they don't have to work with a lot of people, especially cross team boundaries or, you know, minimize the number of people they have to work with. It's like, okay, you have one interface point on this team and it's so-and-so and maybe prepare so-and-so to say, look, I'm coaching this person. and they're working through some development issues and maybe issues isn't the right word, but they're working on some things. So would you please be patient with them? And I think if you manage expectations like that with a small enough group of people, you can actually mitigate the impact. Do you think you can be that guy in some contexts and not in others? Like, do you think there's an element to the environment that allows or somehow encourages the person to behave this way like say say this person gets fired or quits or whatever are they gonna go be that guy at their

next job i don't know i've never followed a person long enough to know if it cross cuts jobs yeah i think sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't like i think the tolerances might be different at different places exactly i know i know people do change with their environment and sometimes substantially yeah what you're describing sounds kind of like the you said work on the interfaces is i've heard this described as put them in a closet and you slide the requirements under the door and they slide the code back under the door yeah which can work if that's it can be a more work than it's worth to define requirements enough so that they can be slid under the door and and you can receive correct code back yeah it's a lot of work up front it it is yeah and and sometimes

you don't know them and like you can't you have to be able to work with someone to figure them out even to go build them and and then it it falls over pretty hard yeah yeah i just keep going back to what what would i do as an ic in this situation and and i fall back to the old talk to my manager and express it in terms of the cost and the impact it's having on on myself and the team so if there's a project for example that was late or that went off the rails because uh you couldn't talk because uh people were worried about i don't know this person flying off the handle or you didn't find out some information because they had offended someone who was important that's a concrete example and and the hardest part about this is is i've often observed this

there's a lot of feelings that seem to be just below the threshold of of like concrete enough examples to take action on right but you just kind of have a feeling about what it's like to work with this person. So it can be a lot of work to turn this from, I don't like working with this person. And it's hard to, here's the situation and here's what the behavior was and here's what the impact was. Which is why this doesn't change a lot of times because it is a lot of work for everybody besides that guy. Yeah, exactly. And you have a job, right? So what about like a shock collar treatment? Who gets the button that shocks? Like the whole team. Okay. I can press this button what about what if everyone on the team has to wear one and anytime anyone kind of becomes

quote that guy someone can press the button and then the whole team gets shocked no no just the one person oh so everyone okay so i if i have a team i'm not sure i'm not trying to be cruel jameson come on i'm trying to make sure i understand the logistics here so i'm on a team of five developers in my hand i hold four remotes one for each of the other four developers on the team and so do all of my colleagues and they also have four got it yeah boy that could make stand-ups a lot faster you seem to be getting pretty into the weeds there zap i think it would only be fair for your manager to wear one and all of the team members to have

the controls for the manager as well though oh oh fun well that sounds like a psychology experiment from the 60s that someone would have done before like ethics were a thing before ethics were a thing oh okay i do have one more uh realistic solution to consider which is that you know the question asker mentioned it here which is a very interesting thing they said it seems so common that people just say, oh, that's just so and so. So what that says to me is there is a subset of the population who has learned to cope effectively with that guy. Now, I want to reiterate, my main position is it is your manager's responsibility to coach this person so that

they can interact effectively with their team without causing a lot of pain. And it's really for their sake and for the team's sake and for everyone. But if that's not possible, there are ways to get close to a person so that you don't feel so much pain when you interact with them and one way to do that is to develop a personal relationship with them you know do do things outside of work get to know them on a level beyond this is the person who makes me crazy at work you know and that's what i've found that it takes to bridge the gap between this person's so annoying and makes me feel bad all the time to oh that's just so and so up to their old so and so things you know if you can make it personal but i don't mean make it personal that's not like in a

super villain way yeah yeah now it's personal i mean if you can make them more of a person and have a personal relationship with them and i don't mean you have to get romantic or marry them please don't but if you know them on a personal level and understand them as more than just that coworker who drives me nuts, I think it helps. It's a good coping mechanism. It can be a coping mechanism, I should say. It can be. Boy, can it not sometimes too. Maybe it makes it worse. I don't know. Yeah, that makes sense. I have one more suggestion, which is, unlike my other suggestions, not guaranteed to work in all situations. So you'll have to be responsible for thinking if this will help or not. You could approach this from a standpoint of kind of defining with the

team how you want to work together, what behaviors are acceptable, what expectations do you hold each other to. And if you have some kind of, I've heard these called ways of working or charters or things like that, if you have something, it's much easier for the group to hold each other accountable for working in this way together instead of depending on these kind of fuzzily defined shared feelings of feels bad it's very possible to be that guy in a way that skirts and does not seem to go against any of these ways of working but but this might help in some cases all right well let me give an example like okay for example if interruption is a big problem like i just interrupted you um just so you know i'm i'm fuming over here okay well i don't care because i'm that guy

you could you could define it as important to your team to let people finish their thoughts right you don't we don't interrupt we have some way of indicating like i would like to talk next and wait for stuff to resolve and then it's less about i mean it kind of is targeted at that guy but it's more about saying well here's the thing we agreed to do and and uh so let's let's please behave this way and maybe a bit more outcome focused than like focused on the person specifically so create big all-encompassing policies that make everyone else less effective to target one individual got it you know just kidding i'm just i'm beginning to think you're that guy dave i'm so sorry i just had to take the dig yeah i mean that is a danger right like

if it really is about one person and everyone works easily together you're going to slow down if you have to rigidly define a communication framework that is really like, don't be the person that is hard to work with. We better move on though. Okay. Hey, Jameson, have you heard how easy it is to hire engineers right now? Given infinite dollars, it is easy to hire engineers right now. I just don't have those. Yeah, it's tough. I want to recommend a company that helps you hire engineers in Latin America. It's called Ravello. Tell me about it. I've been hiring engineers in latin america for the past two years and they are awesome i've worked with a few different companies who provide engineers from latin america but none of them were really great

i recently discovered revelo revelo helps you find skilled software engineers in latin america they only provide full-time senior engineers with at least five years of experience they don't force you to pay for things you don't need like a project manager this is really interesting their pricing is awesome because they charge a monthly fee and you know how much they're paying the developers So there's not a lot of indirection there, which is not common. Sometimes you get these opaque invoices and you have to figure out how much is actually going to the developer, how much is going to the company. They do the sourcing and the vetting, and you can interview the engineers before deciding

if you want to work with them. And they take care of payroll and benefits, which is great. Yeah, I highly recommend hiring engineers in Latin America. It's a huge untapped market for a lot of US companies. All of Ravello's engineers speak English, and the time zone is one of the big wins. If you're based in the united states the latin american time zones line up really well with u.s Time zones, you don't have that painful 24-hour turnaround problem when you have a question for an engineer on the other side of the world Yeah, I worked with wonderful engineers that live on the other side of the world and both of our lives were worse

Because someone's always up at midnight. So this is great. Check out revelo today You can go to revelo.com soft skills to check it out. That's r-e-v-e-l-o.com soft skills okay dave would you like to read our next question yes this uh comes from an anonymous listener who says i am a senior fe engineer i think that means front end and i have recurring one-on-ones with my skip level manager which is the manager of my manager who is the head of engineering at the unicorn i work for i usually ask what is top of mind for them usually hiring is their answer give feedback about my manager and get additional feedback on bigger picture things i'm working on for example we're currently working on metrics to measure impact and value of our design system and

other internal tooling what else would you ask them to make the best use of this time when when you say ask them what is top of mind i just imagine them having a a scatterbrain like i have and literally just giving you what is top of mind which might be what yeah what is literally at the top of my mind right now i'm just thinking about the shade of red of the kvm on my desk and i don't even really know if it's red right like there's no absolute is it the same red that you see i don't know it's part of that is that what you meant and they're your boss's boss so boy is it hard to interrupt them and and get them back on track

i think this is cool that you have a skip level i have found it useful to be on either end of skip levels and i think it is a it is an indication that your boss's boss wants more information about how things are working which i have seen be be positive in the past i guess oh you you think the skip level sometimes sets this up so that they can kind of get your take on things and see how things are working on the ground i think so yeah my understanding of the purpose of the skip level is for the boss's boss to get more direct information about how things are operating in their reports team. Because I'm sure they talk to your boss all the time about how things are going, but that is just one viewpoint filtered through them. And so they're kind of like maybe

checking some assumptions or doing a bit of their own digging. And I feel like that's useful. And so what you're saying is that one thing you can do is share your perspective, because that's useful to them probably yeah there's i mean there can be some weird feelings around maybe you you want to be careful not to i don't know undermine your manager or if if every meeting with your boss's boss is you telling your boss's boss how bad of a boss your boss is that seems seems fraught i felt like when i read this question i thought i had lots of good things to say and uh now you're hearing them all these good things i have to say what is top of mind for them i i would be interested in hearing if they know what you are working on like that can be a

good proxy for how important it seems to them if they know what you're working on or or if they have what they think the impact of your work is oh yeah great call out i'll tell you like this i think there's really two things kind of two themes that you can go after in a one-on-one with your skip level manager. One is that you can try to influence them. If there are things about the organization that you want to see changed, this is your opportunity to put your two cents in directly. And I would use it, but be careful because you might end up being responsible for something new and make sure you want that. Or you might find yourself at the center of some controversy. I don't know. I'm just kind of winging it here on that one. I think you could

also run into problems if you you are pushing for change that you and your boss aren't aligned on at all or or like if you are pushing for something that your boss really does not want to do it's it's gonna be tricky if if you think you can get them on board with you and you just also need some support from your boss's boss then that could work well but if if your boss's boss hears you pushing for this thing and knows that your boss doesn't want to do it they'll probably say hey report here's what here's what your report told me you need to go figure this out because it seems like you two are not aligned very well yeah that's totally true so that so that was theme one was trying to influence someone at a more senior position to change the organization

in a way you want theme two in my opinion is information sharing so like james we've already talked about this a little bit but like unfettered unfiltered information sharing if you this is particularly useful if you feel that your boss is not necessarily representing your work fully to your skip level manager. And so this is a chance to kind of brag on yourself, talk about the contributions you've made to the team, share the wins directly, and make sure you get full credit. And I say that because credit can be diffuse and it can be hard for managers to stay on top of all that and share it and make sure that all the good news gets where it needs to get. Are you talking about your own work or the team's work in general?

Well, I was talking more about your own work, like making sure that you individually have representation at this level in the organization. Yeah. Like, frankly, when I do skip level one-on-ones, I love it when people are like, hey, can I show you what I've been working on? I'm like, yeah, direct exposure

to the things you've been working on. And then I know exactly who's name to put on that when I see like an announcement a week later or something. It's awesome. I'm really, really grateful when people do that. Like, hey, you want to see a demo? Like, yeah, I do. I love that.

Yeah. that's a good point not everyone will but i love it what about the old trope about not bringing problems bringing solutions or would you be concerned about being the person who complains about stuff if you're trying to push for a change without a solution yeah no because i think well if i'm so i would not just go to a skip level manager and say here's a problem here's a problem here's a problem here's a problem but if i had something that i wanted to actually drive forward and i had ideas about making something better, I would bring those. And I think that's very different than being someone who just brings problems. Yeah. That's an interesting point. It sort of

implies that you've done some amount of prep of you have something you might want to pitch, not just kind of winging stuff off the top of your head. Yeah, exactly. Which is counter to how I like to move through the world. So that idea might be a little bit foreign to me. You prepare? What? You don't just show up and- What's that? Say what's top of mind? Yeah. I had another top of mind session with my skip level. Yeah.

I really like what the question asker said about additional feedback on bigger picture things that I am working on. If your skip level manager kind of is talking to the group as a whole about what they're working on or going through some presentation, they might be maybe a bit reserved in their feedback. if they have major concerns they might not want to just kind of torpedo the whole team in front of a group or something like that so it might be a good place to get if you can demonstrate to your skip level manager that you are a a safe and responsible place for them to express real concerns they have then you might be able to hear hear things you wouldn't hear otherwise about what they think is going wrong you know and what you might be able to do differently

yeah and this will depend on how guarded your uh skip level manager is but yeah it's it is a great way to get information and if they ever say something like hey look just just keep this between the two of us you know make sure you're listening yeah that's probably a good way to not hear that information again if you if you don't do that right if you don't keep it confidential yeah that's a great point and and i have been surprised at the willingness of senior leaders in an organization to tell me their totally candid feelings about a situation, you know, like, Hey, how are we doing financially? Or, Hey, how do you, how do you feel about our performance as a team? You know, they'll, they might just tell you like most people don't get

into a senior role because they're so guarded and, and careful and never want to ruffle any feathers. You know, like there's a good chance. They'll just say, yep, here's my concern. I mean, remember this is the stuff they work in every day, you know? So it's like, you're asking them about their day job essentially it'd be like the same thing like asking you about why a function parameter is a string and not an integer you know you gave me another idea which is you just grill them you like put them through a job interview like give them a coding challenge yeah you can ask them whatever you want why not just uh test their chops see if they can hack it listen i i only have one question for you today in our skip level one-on-one and that is i need you to solve

the 18th fibonacci number recursively yeah and watch them sweat have we answered the question probably not very well but as well as we're going to get today who's our skip level is that the listeners i think you need to go ask the listeners it's the highest paying patreon okay uh we'll get that name to you and then i have regular one-on-ones by the way i don't know if you know that shoot better be on my best behavior then well what can people do if they would like their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button and as usual we say thank you so much to everyone who does that we really appreciate reading your questions uh so many of you ask so many good thoughtful

questions we love all of them keep them coming thank you thank you we'll catch you next week you