Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 317: Process renegades and hiding my disgrunteledness

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a small company that has recently grown from a couple of engineers to 40+ due to some great new project opportunities. As part of this transition, many new policies are being implemented. The policies concerning the engineering department primarily revolve around task tracking and reporting time. Gone are the days when an engineer can charge eight hours to “fixing stuff” and earn a paycheck. Most of us are on board, but there are three engineers in particular who have been around for quite some time and vary between subtly passive aggressive to downright combative when it comes to creating JIRA tasks and logging their hours. The problem? They serve an absolutely critical role in our company. They are nigh irreplaceable in an extremely niche market. How should a manager strike the perfect balance between forcing an engineer to do something that they don’t want to do and not forcing them out? If this was a more common skillset, there wouldn’t be an issue with telling them “You don’t like it, go find another job”. But when there are a handful of people in the world that do this kind of thing and it closely involves hardware and these three just happen to be local… well, you get the idea. Losing these individuals would be a staggering blow the company. Making them redundant isn’t economically feasible. Time to ramp up for this position would be close to a year. So I’ve recently followed the first rule of Soft Skills Engineering and quit my job. All right! I believe in the new role and I think it’ll be a good change to me. Despite this, I’m feeling guilty about leaving my team behind. When my managers asked me how I was feeling in the last few quarters, I’ve mostly said I’m fine! I never told them my reservations about how the codebase I’m working on has no oversight, that they need to hire another dev because I don’t trust being the sole keeper, that it seems like product has forgotten this feature. I even indulged them when they asked me to make a long-term career plan when I was certain I would leave by early next year at the latest. So, what’s your take on how disgruntled employees often have to hide their true feelings? Maybe I could’ve been open, but it really seemed like the odds were against us, it’s just that upper leadership was neglecting this feature and there was no urgency to improve things. But I still feel like I wasn’t being fully honest. What do you guys think? Thanks so much and keep up the good work! Feelin’ Guilty P.S. Do you feel that this industry naturally rewards lack of loyalty and connection? What do you feel about that?

it takes more than giving poor ratings on your engagement survey to signal that you want to raise and don't want to come back to the office only to result in a strong correlation between low engagement and remote work to be a great shot myself in the foot engineer this is episode 317 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly show where we talk about the non-technical things about the technical field of software development like i don't know what this would be interesting ways to interpret data in the worst way possible for you i mean here's this is what i'm hearing is you want to raise so you give a poor rating on an engagement survey but you work from home and you

don't want to come back into the office and then your employer concludes that people who work from home are low engagement yeah that sucks so bad oh man we've talked about goodhart's law a bunch but i'm going to talk about it again when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be an effective measure that's right and if engagement is like a target we got to raise engagement then you're gonna do weird stuff to raise it oh yeah that might not have the outcome that you intend slack bots uh yeah number one engagement hack i saw a tweet from a developer saying my site's been getting crazy amounts of traffic i was really pumped and then i looked at the logs and someone's been pinging my site 25 times a second

for like monitoring purposes some bot or something but for a while they were just skyrocketing up do you want to thank our patrons dave sure but first i just want to say it's too bad you didn't sell a bunch of advertising impressions to advertisers for all those bots yeah i mean i think that's probably happening enough already just want a sweet piece of that pie yeah those those bots will get paid yeah don't worry facebook will pay those bots okay yeah i didn't say that out loud all right yes i would like to thank our patrons they are kent c dodds teodor savin nathan sack on meanster josh owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock the very long name of

a town in north wales that ends in go go go kashokton ohio patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org will angel who does not have the stinky feet ragnar nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant nick cantar and philip john basile if you'd like to join this illustrious crew go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you make a material impact to jameson's yacht payment we will say your name online or the name of an impossible to pronounce town in north wales and if you support us at any dollar amount we'll give you an invitation to our slack community at the start of each month and just want to say thank you to everyone who's done that i want to say thank you

i also want to qualify a statement you said you said if you make a material impact it's got to be a positive material impact you cannot come give me a large expense smash a hole in my windshield so i have to material impact yeah how's this for material impact yeah it's got the impact part and the material that's true yeah material was impacted this episode is sponsored by hired the best way to quit your job and get a new one you can go to hired.com soft skills so you learn more or you can wait and hear our beautiful voices talk more about them later in the show thank you do you want to read the first question dave yeah this comes from an anonymous listener who says i work at a small company that has recently grown from a

couple of engineers to 40 plus due to some great new project opportunities as part of this transition many new policies are being implemented the policies concerning the engineering department primarily revolve around task tracking and reporting time. Gone are the days when an engineer can charge eight hours to, quote, fixing stuff and earn a paycheck. Most of us are on board, but there are three engineers in particular who have been around for quite some time

and vary between subtly passive-aggressive to downright combative when it comes to creating Jira tasks and logging their hours. The problem? They serve an absolutely critical role in our company. They are nigh irreplaceable, nice use of the word nigh i like that nigh irreplaceable in an extremely niche market how should a manager strike the perfect balance between forcing an engineer to do something that

they don't want to do and not forcing them out if this was a more common skill set there wouldn't be an issue with just telling them look you don't like it go find another job but when there are a handful of people in the world that do this kind of thing and it closely involves hardware and these three just happen to be local well you get the idea losing these individuals would be a staggering blow to the company making them redundant isn't economically feasible time to ramp up for this position would be close to a year this is uh this is some developers dreams like i have this company right where i want them they can't tell me to do anything daily stand up i think not i'll stand up if i want yeah if i stand up to the idea of daily stand up

just count yourself lucky i showed up to work this week now you're replaceable three engineers been around for quite some time yeah this is interesting so i expect that they have concerns about the culture change as the company has grown and feel like it's lost that that kind of early days feel of you can just focus on the work and don't have to worry about all these policies and red tape and bureaucracy uh and i've felt that way myself so i can kind of see it i have been known to be subtly passive aggressive about task tracking in the past which is ironic given that i now work on a a tool that allows you to track tasks tell me about some of the ways that you've subtly implemented passive aggression oh man it's been a

while i feel like this was back in my earlier less mature days so i don't know that i have specific examples i mean i'm sure it was like snarky like updates to the tickets or whatever just to like get people off my back like i worked 6.39247 hours on this task yeah yeah or just like whining about the value of estimates when we're trying to assign estimates to stuff in in sprint planning or something being an old stick in the mud or a young stick in the mud in this case yeah well i spent about eight years of my career working in a world where you were required to track every hour in fact one of my companies said they wanted it tracked at the six minute increment which is a tenth of an hour yeah so some some uh phrasing in this question

clues me into the idea that this is this is probably not in the u.s making people redundant i think that's yeah a british term for layoffs i think oh yes i know it's not an american term yeah because i'm already redundant that's my goal then i don't have to work i just get paid so i wonder if the uh the time tracking requirement is is like industry-based or country-based maybe there's some reason why They have to do it for that. You know what I think might be happening here? When companies grow from small to kind of medium size like this, management starts to get nervous that they've made this big investment in engineering.

I mean, think of it. Two engineers to 40, they multiplied their financial obligation by a factor of 20. And now the question is, are we getting our money's worth? Is this workforce actually working productively? You know? Yeah. especially if it's remote i don't know if it's a remote position but i think remote compounds this problem and management just wants to know are you all working on stuff that we want you to work

on yeah also the the normal i think the default mode is that more engineers give diminishing returns i i would be shocked if this this engineering group gets 20 times more stuff done oh yeah for sure especially given that only two of them know how to do anything so so they might they might have this feeling of productivity is going down we got to do something i have a couple suggestions but none of them are great you are you're in a tricky spot time to ramp up for this position would be close to a year the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago the second best time is today you should hire somebody and ramp them up now so that a year from now you will not be held hostage by these people as badly you'll be thanking one year ago

you or a year from now you could be held hostage by four people they they might get like pulled into the the clique and yeah uh start wearing the the decorative patches on their leather jackets that identify them as the Jira renegades. The anti-task trackers. Yeah. We have a whole biker club. We ride Harley Davidson motorcycles, we wear bandanas, and we have patches.

We're really very organized for a group that doesn't like to organize our work. Losing these individuals would be a staggering blow to the company. This is interesting. I think you've identified a potential existential threat to the company because losing them by telling them you need to track your time is not the only way you could lose these people they could win the lottery go get a different job they could get poached they could decide they

don't want to work anymore like there's a lot of reasons they might not work in the here anymore they could get poached from from the one other company that does this same stuff yeah yeah so there's a couple ways to address this one of the ways is kind of what the what the question seems to be hinting at which is like we got to keep these people around we need to um appease them and make their work environment match what they want and and because we can't afford to lose them but the other way is you you have a pretty big risk that you need to alleviate by spreading that knowledge out i think that's just a longer version of my first answer of hire someone now you already hired 38 someones yeah that's true get some of them to ramp them up yeah i'm sure

They can't all be doing useful work, right? Isn't it part of a manager's skill set to convince people to do what they don't inherently want to do? Yes. What if you created a financial incentive system where you were like, look, and this would actually be a good litmus test of the policy. the manager says look for every hour you log on a task i will pay you an extra ten dollars you know i don't know come up with a number and so it's like instant raise if they'll just log their time pay it out as a monthly bonus is this like a chekhov's gun style thing where i mentioned goodhart's law in the intro and now you have to that means later on in the podcast we will we

will mention a way in which you can like horribly distort incentives an extra ten dollars per hour huh it's like i'll just sit on this one for a while even though it's done yeah you don't like you go find them in later jobs so there yeah there's a bunch of ways to to do this that have varying levels of aggressiveness and of like like they might work differently for different combinations of personalities. One thing that I my first thing to try would

be to talk about the reason for doing this. What is the outcome? We're not doing this because we want engineers to be annoyed or to work more slowly. There's some material benefit for the company as a whole, hopefully.

And can you identify that and tie their participation in this process back to that? That assumes that they're motivated by the idea of doing things that are materially beneficial to the company, and maybe they're not. But explaining the why behind something can help quite a bit. It might also result in you trying other things that achieve the same outcome. Maybe there's an alternative solution that does not involve tracking your hours

or making it easier to track hours that achieves the same outcome. And if you can get their minds thinking on that, maybe there's some useful stuff that comes out of there. Yeah, I like that. Also, having to stand up and justify why it's a good idea to someone will create, in my opinion, a little internal feedback loop in your own mind of, is this really a good idea? And here I'm talking about management, so not exactly what the question asker is asking about. But if I find that I can't convince someone to do something myself, I usually start arguing with myself over whether the thing I want is actually good. Maybe that'll happen. One possible outcome. yeah another solution that i hate but that is possible is you can just like push the cost of this on someone else and by that i mean is there some other role that you can like assign to just help these people check the boxes in the system i hate that because it's kind of rewarding them like by saying hey you don't like this work well the company will pay extra money so you don't have

to do it it's putting them up on even more of a pedestal they get these special exceptions and special support but if it's really important that stuff gets logged and tracked maybe it's worth those costs or maybe thinking about that will make you realize it's actually not so i have another idea yeah hit me i'm reading this question as if it's coming from a peer not a manager so let's go with that okay as a peer you seem very nervous about these people leaving the company and i think i know why which is because if they leave you'll be helpless as an engineer like you absolutely depend on them to get your job done without being able to go to them ask them questions get their consultation you'll be stuck that's what i'm hearing here so why don't you

offer to just fill out their time cards for them and then you get the ten dollars for every hour yeah don't forget you can also get a raise this way yeah which feels like letting the bullies win your sense of cosmic justice is offended yeah yeah like someone is behaving badly and so your answer is i will appease you by doing extra work that kind of sucks i would be shocked if this person wanted to fill out their own time cards you know but like it sounds like they do it out of a understanding that it's important somehow or maybe they're just a preeminent people pleaser like myself and i don't care what the reason is i just want to make you happy yeah i don't know i feel like so i was reading this as coming from a manager and one other approach you might take is

engage some of these people's peers to uh talk about the importance of this it it hits differently when it comes from a peer versus a manager when someone is is either uh explaining why something is helpful for them or or asking someone to do something like for the good of the team this is like astroturfing yeah kind of i mean if you have folks that these people respect that they work with that also can be convinced that this is important and useful for the company then maybe you can uh stage a little intervention with them or something and then you know to keep the checkoffs gun theme going you tell these team members like look every time you drop a positive comment to so-and-so about the time tracking policy i'll give you 10 bucks

and then the slack bots come out of the woodwork just 24 7 spamming positive comments about time it's like i used to mind bitcoin but now now i mind poorly considered incentive structures at my company very well said very well said all right well have we answered the question i think so good luck this is a tricky situation because they do genuinely have a lot of power and and you are seeing them exercise that and yeah they are correct they are very hard to get rid of and so they can kind of get away with stuff hey jameson have you heard about the great resignation is it that charles dickens book wait no the entire population on earth has started

taking our advice of quit your job oh yes that's right apparently we have achieved influencer status we've been telling developers for years to quit their jobs and now we want to tell you how to do it we're ready to reveal the secret i mean you don't just walk out shooting finger guns yes well you do that first but after you do that there's a new service we want to tell you about called Hired. What is Hired, Dave? Hired is the biggest AI-driven marketplace that matches engineers with companies. It is a great way to find your next job. I've been watching this industry for 20 years with a keen interest on hiring in particular, and I've never seen anything like Hired. Tell me about what you're seeing. So I've interviewed about 150 people in

the last year, and I am serious. Every candidate that's come to me through Hired has multiple offers, and they're incredibly high, scary high, like 30% higher than other candidates. is that before after the finger guns yeah uh both the beauty is it's totally free for engineers uh and we would love for you to go try it go to hired.com soft skills to check it out hired.com soft skills quit your job the best way and check out hired all right would you like to read our next one yeah i will read our next question this is from an anonymous listener so i've recently followed the first rule of soft skills engineering and quit my job all right i believe in the new role and think it'll be a good change

for me despite this i'm feeling guilty about leaving my team behind when my managers ask me how i've been feeling in the last few quarters i've mostly said i'm fine i never told them my reservations about how the code base i'm working on has no oversight that they need to hire another dev because i don't trust myself being the sole keeper that it seems like product has forgotten this feature. I even indulge them when they ask me to make a long-term career plan when I was certain I would leave by early next year at the latest. So what's your take on how disgruntled employees often have to hide their true feelings? Maybe I could have been open, but it really seemed like the odds were against us. It's just that upper leadership was neglecting this feature and

there was no urgency to improve things. I still feel like I wasn't being fully honest. What do you think? Thanks so much and keep up the good work. Oh, they're not anonymous. They signed this feeling guilty feeling guilty ps do you feel that this industry naturally rewards a lack of loyalty and connection how do you feel about that oh you can't ask two questions and one question that's cheating go back to the forum get back in line yeah get get back in line um okay so summary you were totally dishonest about how crappy you felt at work and then you quit but leading up to the quitting you pretended like you were happy yeah this question was like a twist for me because i thought the question was going to be should i quit should i quit this place but no they they

had quit and they were asking like what would you do to handle me in the future i've seen this a lot yes in myself and in people who report to me in myself because this is a form of self-preservation i think it's a form of keeping your optionality high it's like yeah i'm not happy here but i'm not sure i have a good exit yet so i don't want to rock the boat and make management think of firing me yeah i think you've identified the reason right off the bat which is that people are worried there will be some kind of consequence it doesn't even have to be retaliation of like you want to quit then you're fired it can be i mean maybe maybe uh if they know you're leaving at some point then you're you'll be targeted for layoffs because

you're leaving anyways you know or they'll withhold your bonus or they'll pass you up for a promotion or they won't give you a cool opportunity like there's a thousand ways that management could react if they don't think you're engaged yeah and i mean at a good company those are all probably pretty low probability but they're also very expensive if they happen yeah to you and and saying everything's fine is pretty cheap that's right the cost of lying about how unhappy you are is low and and we've all heard stories of retaliation you know in fact just this week i heard uh one of my team members tell a story about how they raised some concerns about a company to the company's management and then like the next day they were fired whoa i heard

a story this week about retaliation from someone i work with too do tell well it was the same kind of thing was it the story they told after you retaliated at them no it was like someone it was something like their boss gave one of those like i welcome feedback type of speeches and then they gave them some feedback that was uh here's how i think you should do some things differently and it turns out that they did not welcome that feedback i also no longer welcome your employment yeah yeah it's rough it's a high stake situation right And I think you nailed it when you said the cost of withholding that information, very low, but the risk of disclosing, very high. And it may be a few bad apples situation, right?

Where it's like most companies won't do this to you, but there's enough that will. You don't want to roll the dice. Is expected value the term for that? Oh. like you buy a lottery ticket it costs one cent the payout is a million dollars but there's some percentage chance that you win so you can value that ticket at some percentage times a million dollars right right right that's kind of how i'm thinking about this of like yeah it's probably not likely but would you would you risk like ten thousand dollars for this because that right

it could be some combination of the cost and the likelihood there are no real numbers here obviously right but that idea is bouncing around in my head so if you said you've been in this situation in the past can you think of things that your company could have done to discern your true feelings no no way we promised not to get you in trouble dave no amount of that would work no you can trust us we're friends you know there's there's kind of this mutually beneficial it's mutually beneficial when when employees don't share their true disgruntled feelings i think because imagine like most people are frustrated with their job at least some of the time if not most of the time i think yeah jobs are hard right that's what the money's for yeah

wipe away your disgruntled tears with the dollar bills like jobs are hard right i mean this is why we get paid to do it if it was fun we would do it for free yeah and so if every employee shared full disclosure all the time i think it would be such a burden on management it really would like you do nothing but assuage people's disgruntled feelings isn't there like a financial institution of some kind is it's like a hedge fund or something like that that i think they showed up in the the radical candor book they're a several hundred person organization that truly does say exactly how they feel all the time okay and it sounds pretty gnarly honestly it's like it's pretty intense it seems to take a specific type of person to succeed there like thicker skin than you can

imagine yeah most places are not like that i gotta tell you the first time i experienced this on the management side of the table was quite a shock to me i had been in a management role for about a year i had been doing weekly or monthly one-on-ones with this person who reported to me for that whole time and every time we sat down across the table from each other i asked how you're doing the answer was great happy to be here loving it yeah and then one day i walk into my office and this guy's laptop is sitting on my chair with a post-it note saying i resign and i was like what just happened i took the laptop to my boss and said i just found this on my chair and my boss was like oh my gosh that's really unusual and so then uh you know

we're kind of trying to piece it together he's like you know what happened in your one-on-ones What did you learn? And I'm like, he said he was fine, you know. And then finally, my boss manages to get a hold of the person on like by email later and says, hey, give me your honest take on what happened. And the guy just wrote a novel of all the complaints he had, complaints of the company, complaints of the team, specific personal complaints against me. Whoa. I realize in that moment that you really have to earn your team members honesty. they will not share with you even when they're feeling very very strongly negative about what you're doing yeah i'm not really sure if i've ever been able to achieve that i mean yeah that's a good question because how can you know right like this person said they were fine even if someone

shares some critical feedback they might be holding back more stuff oh yeah everyone's holding back something all the time right yeah like well fine but i really don't like the way you parted your hair today yeah or that you neglected to part your hair today yeah exactly so i don't know i'm not really sure there's an answer like i try very hard to earn my team members trust but guess what this goes both ways like there's also stuff management isn't going to tell you yeah yeah you know it's like well guess i guess we both have secrets yeah please share with me the stack ranking you've made of all the engineers no i choose i choose not to share and i haven't even done that yeah i would i would never what stack what yeah i don't even know what that is

oh oh is that is that the chart where i put you all with a number one next to your name is that where we like do a competition to see who can build the stack data structure the fastest that's the stack rank yeah oh man i i think i have been yeah i've definitely been this person of of i knew i was probably gonna quit just was kind of why did i do it i didn't see any benefit in it the concerns i had were not things i felt like could be changed by me talking about them openly with with my boss that's a huge reason not to share yeah what's the point like it could turn into retaliation and it's nothing good is gonna happen yeah yeah i mean there's some tiny chance that

15 years from now this could be some harvard business school case study and it all started with this one one-on-one jameson told his company with millions of employees that he wished that they did this one thing differently the change it's like the butterfly that flapped its wings yeah just change the whole exactly exactly i did once in management i did once have someone come to me uh right after i had moved into management this is years ago came to me and sat down and just started unloading all the problems they had with the organization and then at the end said i'm telling you these things because i think you can fix them wait you're not just telling them to me because it will make you feel better to tell them to me

and that's that's it that's what i was hoping for i know i was just hoping this was a venting session i don't want to work on that this is hard but it was the eye-opening part was when he said i'm only telling you this because i think you can fix it i realized that when people withhold one of the reasons they withhold is because they don't think you can so yeah you know maybe this is a referendum on on you when your team members aren't willing to share problems with you yeah i mean i would venture that you have stuff like this at your current job i do i have disgruntledness that i have not told people i have i have plenty that i have talked to people about as well but there's some stuff that yeah that feels like it doesn't hit that level of like i don't have it

articulated enough i don't feel like it's actionable enough maybe i'm wrong like i'm not confident maybe i'm wrong maybe it's just like really petty and spiteful and i have a heuristic that i apply which this heuristic was not clear to me when i was younger in my career but now you know my i feel that my objective in going to work every day is to create a valuable company and serve our customers well and so when i'm contemplating raising concerns with the company i try to apply this threshold is this concern object like materially impacting negatively just like your yacht the these two objectives is it making our company less valuable and is it preventing us from serving our customers well and if it doesn't hit either one of those two

bars then i just i just throw it away like what's the point you know like you could fill your whole day with the things that bother me i'm not i'm not that annoyable let's i don't want to come across super pain in the butt but like i think most people if you really focus on finding things that bother you you can find them and you can fill your whole day talking about them yeah so i try to i try to hedge against that by setting a standard for like what is my long-term objective here yeah and do these complaints get me closer to that objective now what i like about what you've said there is that you've completely abandoned any principles of justice or right or good at all that don't result in the company making more money that's right at any cost at any ethical

or moral cost yes yeah exactly that's interesting i've felt myself get caught in a trap where i i get sucked into crusades about things that don't meet those two criteria but they just they they irk something yeah inside me of like this is not how it should happen they feel articulate yeah it feels it feels wrong and it needs to feel right i think i did that last week actually i hopefully do it less than i used to but that's an interesting framework to think about stuff i haven't really i haven't really thought about my my failed i mean they don't always fail sometimes they succeed wildly in that the thing i get all worked up about changes it fails and that it usually doesn't matter yeah maybe that's giving me a framework to think about how to avoid that

stuff in the future i'm really good at effectuating low impact change i remember this one time i got this very obscure very low risk very low likelihood of being exploited very low impact if it was exploited security vulnerability uh-huh stuck in my head i found it in the code and i just like ranted at my boss for days about it and they they kind of just smiled and nodded and were like okay i see you feel strongly about this and sort of like deflected and i eventually went away and then a few years later realized that i was being a moron it does not matter at all at all at all at all if that affects the company then we've we've got either way more financial success or way bigger problems if that's like the thing that affects anything for customers i think i think we've

all had that experience especially early in our careers you find that piece of code and you're like this cannot stand yeah this this is wrong this is a linear search on a list the list has four items yes you read my mind it will never matter but it must be a constant time lookup warning i'm gonna add a comment to the top of this function warning this is a linear search call at your own risk call out your manager by name and say they forced you to betray your engineering principles and you protest formally i didn't want to write this code but i was forced to oh i love how we're just talking about like giving up just give up it's fine if you apply the right heuristic nothing matters and that is the ultimate piece that's what do

they call it in zen buddhism enlightenment nihilism no no no the uh where you've been enlightenment yeah is that what nirvana is i i know like what you can read on the popsicle stick underneath the popsicle about zen buddhism you know they sometimes hide little messages there oh do you mean the zen buddhists hide messages for you yes well they don't do it very often that's why that's why i don't know very much if they were more this is like the weirdest conspiracy theory ever i just know it dave i got this message on a popsicle stick what does it mean jameson launched a 20-year quest i've arranged a sequence of 4 000 popsicle sticks in order reproduced this message it's uh i'll i'll update you on that question okay keep me posted all right

well if we answered this question i think so who among us has not pretended that they're not going to quit yeah probably no one i'm happy happy as a clam by the way here's my resignation letter yeah dave i just want to tell you i'm perfectly content doing this podcast yeah me too to our continuing working relationship i'm highly engaged very happy you know 10 out of 10 net promoter score yeah but no comments left in anything just yeah all the all the numbers are highest all the multiple choice things or whatever it looks the best i'm optimizing for speed here all right gosh what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills.audio and fill out our form in such a way that we can totally understand that you are totally satisfied

with this podcast and we'll never stop listening we really appreciate everyone who fills out those forms your stories are amazing we love reading them each week thank you so much keep them coming we do discard any of them that make us look bad no yeah we appreciate them all we we read them all i think i think i there are probably some in there i haven't read but i feel like on average i end up reading them all yeah you definitely do you're a fast reader yes and i comprehend everything i read yeah clearly i never skim yeah we we appreciate you listening and we appreciate you sending in questions we'll catch you next week