Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 319: Steve's babysitter and these uncertain times

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: My company wants several complex applications rewritten. “Steve” wrote the original applications, and has been assigned to do the rewrite. There is very little documentation on the original applications, and the rewrite will take intimate understanding of the existing code and new requirements. Management assigned me to work with Steve. They warned me that since we have started working remotely after covid, Steve has been hard to get a hold of and not meeting deadlines. My job is to keep Steve on task. When I ask Steve a question he will respond “I’ll work on it tomorrow” or “I’ll have to look in to that.” Then I never hear from him again. If I tell management I haven’t been able to get a hold of him, they will contact him, then he will contact me asking “What can I help you with?” Again, all his answers will be “I’ll have to look into that.” Occasionally Steve will report to me that he has finished a task. But because he did it without me, I am even more confused about what needs done or how to do it. I feel like my job has turned in to tattling on Steve. I am afraid I’m going to be labeled a whiner and that this project will harm my career growth. Over the last 2 weeks my solution has been to just ignore the project. Management hasn’t checked in with me, but I’m sitting on a ticking time bomb. What should I do? How to keep our sanity in times of uncertainty? I’ve recently changed jobs and despite the facts shows that I shouldn’t be worried, I can see my judgement is blurred by the fear of getting laid off even there’s no sign of it and I fear I would fulfill the prophecy!

it takes more than using github copilot to generate your code reviews to be a great software engineer this is episode 319 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we talk about all the non-technical things that go into the technical process of software development which might not be technical anymore if you can just use github copilot true for everything github copilot for your task tracker yeah like what should i do today yeah github copilot integrated with your email client i guess gmail kind of has that already they have all that autocomplete stuff it does and it's it's not bad yeah it's frightening it's like

high precision low recall when it makes a suggestion spot on but it doesn't make it for me it doesn't make a lot of suggestions i'm just very obtuse i've had moments of concern about my mental state when i saw what to get what the gmail autocomplete was typing in like if i start typing the word the letter n and then it says no worries if not like ah i just i shouldn't say that that's not a thing i should say yeah you've gone down the neural net machine like that that basically identified you as a pushover yeah exactly yeah github co-pilot for career coaching that's not what this show is about do you want to thank our patrons dave yes thank you so much to those that are contributing every month where they get a shout out on every episode they are

kent c dodds the theodore savin nathan sack on memester josh owen chardell craig motlin i love the stochastic parrot alice jost andrew pollock and yes we've seen the pronunciation guide and no it doesn't help me kashoktonohiopatron.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org will angel who parenthetically does not have 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 over to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you contribute any dollar amount we will send you an invitation to our slack community

at the beginning of each month and if you contribute enough to make a material impact which we've debated what that means to jameson's yacht then we will say your name on the show or the name of the the city with the longest name in europe and quite possibly the whole world which by the way we learned was actually a marketing ploy in the 1800s which i thought was amazing because that kind of that that like that level of trolling i thought was kind of a recent phenomenon but it's not i don't think i was paying attention when we learned that because that that's new information to me just now that's cool i love that yeah i it is it is a true statement according to a youtube video from some random person so absolute truth yeah exactly i mean they made a

video about it for goodness sake yeah how how could something with this high production values be telling me false yeah it was good too the lighting man that's it's called the light of truth should i read our first question yeah go for it this is from an anonymous listener who says my company wants several complex applications rewritten steve in quotes so probably not their real name wrote the original applications and has been assigned to do the rewrite there is very little documentation on the original applications and the rewrite will take intimate understanding of the existing code and new requirements management assigned me to work with steve they warned me that since we had started working remotely after covet steve has been hard to get

a hold of and not meeting deadlines my job is to keep steve on task when i ask steve a question he will respond i'll work on it tomorrow or i'll have to look into that then i never hear from him again if i tell management i haven't been able to get a hold of him they will contact him then he will contact me asking, what can I help you with? Again, all his answers will be, I'll have to look into that. Occasionally, Steve will report to me that he has finished a task, but because he did it without me, I'm even more confused about what needs to be done or how to do it. I feel like my job has turned into tattling on Steve. I'm afraid I'm going to be labeled a whiner and that this project will harm my career growth. Over the last two weeks, my solution has been to just ignore

the project. Management hasn't checked in with me, but I'm sitting on a ticking time bomb. What should i do well here's an idea when management says how's the project you know exactly what to say steve has given you the perfect pattern i'll have to look into that i'll check on that tomorrow management it's moving to the top of tomorrow's to-do list yes oh you've unlocked the secret i think steve has github co-pilot in his slack integration and it's like i'll have to look into that tomorrow i wonder there has to be someone who has like gtp3 their life to some absurd degree right

yeah yeah i mean there are some arguments that were all nothing more than clones of a gtp3 instance now i just want that for for slack let me just say that if if you type the letter i at the start of your slack message and the autocomplete which doesn't really exist but if it did if it says i'll work on it tomorrow that would be very interesting about you i think yeah again some some deep truths being revealed by the magic of machine learning my job has turned into tattling on steve my solution has been to just ignore the project yeah i i think so has steve's it sounds like you have there's more parallels between you than you might know i'm reading back on the description of the original of the project again this sounds like a tough

thing to work on um which has a low chance of success rewrite several complex applications by yourself and by the way you're the person who wrote them first which means you have a lot of knowledge but like you also caused the problem yeah you're you made all these decisions but now you're going to make them again in a newer framework yeah exactly but i've never made these many mistakes in angular 2 yeah it'll be way easier to hire people to clean up our react mess than our backbone mess yeah exactly that's and that's true that is like objectively true cleaning up a modern framework mess is much easier to do or to hire for than cleaning up an ancient framework mess yeah this feels like if if

someone handed me this project and said go to it jameson then i think i would have a lot of trouble feeling like i was making meaningful progress on it as well there's just so much to do and it's you're you're making such tiny dents in the enormous pile of work and like you would have to be really really good at having a technical vision and sticking to it in a way that maybe the past failures of these projects indicate steve is not in order to succeed at this i mean if i were in this situation i would immediately morph into project manager mode i mean my very first tool i would reach for is a spreadsheet where i start typing out a list of all the things that need to be rewritten and steve would help me make this list i mean tomorrow he would help me make

this list you collaborate on it asynchronously with you yeah exactly right which is another way of saying i'm not gonna work on this that's the thing you never know if it did the request fail or did it just not did it get delayed well steve is the human embodiment of the halting problem yeah so yeah i mean that's where i would go and you know and then and then you know eventually this list would grow very large as inevitably happens and in fact i had a team come to me and say i want to rewrite a part of this application and i said okay make a list of all the parts you want to rewrite i want like component by component everything that needs to be rewritten and and come back to me and they came back with a small list and i said i don't think this list is complete

come back to me again in a few days and they came back and it was like hundreds the list was hundreds of items long and i was like now now we understand the the job we're up against this is a big job yeah and then i said now estimate each component rewrite and it came back like a week later i'm like okay we have three thousand hours of work ahead of us yeah and i would i would actually do that and then i would bring it to management and say this is going to cost us and by the way these estimates are always short right this is going to cost us x number of dollars do you really want to do this and by the way the problem must be pretty bad if management is asking you to help rewrite it like a lot of times developers are begging can we please rewrite this

management is like no go away but if management themselves is saying please rewrite this it's bad i think yeah i didn't this person didn't say what their role is but i think they're a software developer the question asker yeah it sounds like it so it sounds like your your recommendation feels spot on of if you want to have an accurate understanding of the status of steve's work you need some understanding of the status of the project overall i think that will that will help you put what steve is working on into context and understand or have more information to understand is steve actually doing the several remote jobs at once thing or or doing the zero remote jobs at once thing but yeah right zero or multiple yes is it just really hard not meeting deadlines

that doesn't feel like whom among us has has met all of the deadlines that doesn't feel like a that in and of itself doesn't indicate to me that steve is not working it could be that steve is doing software developer things where he's he's focused completely on finishing the task and and that means there's not as much time going into like estimating of how long the task will take it could be that he is going rogue and and diving deeply into fixing some non-impactful like nerd snipe stuff and so that's blowing up the timeline but it could just be that it takes a long time as well and and indicating that it takes a long time is taking would take more time so steve is not putting in that work yeah but what is my point here yeah this might turn your

job into a job you don't want if you really don't want to do project management then you you are in some trouble or babysitting because this is like devolved even i mean okay you want to do software engineering fine great you're you're a project manager sorry that's what you are but now you're going even worse you're going to babysitting mode where it's like you're trying to keep track of whether steve is even doing anything you know like to me that's not even project management that's regular management i don't know what what is that and it's a weird spot to be in to manage one other person yeah it's like you have too much time alone with that person you need some time when you're not focused solely on on them for it to not get weird i feel like yeah otherwise you

get kind of cabin fevery i think right right i mean so why don't we lean in just for a moment into what do you do if you're actually what do you do if you are now managing this person you're the one-on-one manager and i gotta ask jameson how do you feel about key loggers great for the world i'm in favor only good 10 out of 10 i'm just thinking i've always wanted to know what other people are typing yeah i'm just in favor of transparency right that's right i think for better or worse you your job has morphed not from project manager not from engineer to project manager, not from project manager to manager, but rather you are

now a crime scene investigator and your job is to build a case against Steve. Now, maybe Steve has critical company information that makes him indispensable, but at the very least, Steve should not be allowed to work from home. And I think you're going to need to build a case for that. And I don't think you should actually go install a key logger, although as with every human problem, there's always a technical solution. That is one to consider, I guess. but it's time to build a case and i think you're going to have ample material to take that case to management and say i don't think steve is actually working here you know just thought you might like to know and you can do with that as you please and i don't see what other choice

you have like your job is to help rewrite this code but the only resource you have to do it is non-existent and so you you know you can either be a hero and try to rewrote the whole rewrite the whole code without steve or you can try to get management to see a new way to solve this problem that doesn't involve steve or that involves steve in a different capacity where he's you know sitting in an office where people can see his screen yeah i do feel like so you said i feel like my job has turned into tattling on steve yeah i think there's probably this is this is getting at what you're saying too just that you you can do more than try to transparently relay to management what steve is doing in the past you have it sounds like you've used them

by saying hey i'm having a hard time getting hold of steve and they'll go ping him but i think you need to start having more deliberate conversations about what they can do to help you like it's it's not sustainable for you to use management as a like pager for steve that's not solving the underlying problem and the fact that you've had to do this several times and it hasn't changed things means that it's that's not enough of a nudge so i think i'm agreeing with you dave which is not shocking because you're right all the time you need to start working with management on what you two can do together to solve this problem instead of them asking you how's steve doing and you say i don't know not super great like if they've put you in this position i think you have

you get to ask them for some help especially if you're if you're a software developer that they've asked to do this and and you're kind of like deliberately going outside of your your defined role so so i think my advice is engage with management more directly on trying to solve the problem instead of just answering their status questions basically and trying to keep steve on task because you don't have the tools if you're steve's peer and you're working remotely and and steve doesn't report to you and like you don't have you might be able to do it and figure it out if if you have the right set of skills but you certainly don't have like the organizational tools and probably not the past experience of solving stuff like this as well

agree you can always say like hey if you want me to be a manager then give me the money show me the money and then i'll do it yeah threaten them and they're like okay we will offer you a five percent raise and now you have to go install this keylogger on steve's you're like i only know one way to do management and it involves keyloggers and maximum transparency well have we answered it i think so good luck to you and to steve yes all right dave do you want to read our next question yes all right this comes from an anonymous listener who says how to keep our sanity in times of uncertainty i've recently changed jobs and despite the facts show that i shouldn't be worried i can see my judgment is blurred by the fear of getting laid

off even when there's no sign of it and i fear that i would fulfill the prophecy which i didn't quite catch the prophecy part so like if i say are there layoffs to my manager my manager might say well there weren't until you asked what a good idea it never occurred to me the facts show i shouldn't be worried so not all the facts show you shouldn't be worried because some of the facts are like you look in the news and there's an endless parade of tech layoffs and another fact is that some times layoffs are performed uh by laying off folks who are newer to the company with the thought that that is less damaging to productivity so this is probably not the advice you're coming to this show looking for but the the risk is

certainly not zero for you having just changed jobs and maybe maybe you're being told like you're doing awesome work and you become very essential and that yeah you know more about that but just if if if i'm like some ceo five organization levels removed from your name i might have a spreadsheet that lists everyone and their tenure at the company and just like sort okay maybe we laugh those people yeah and and there's certainly more that goes into it than that i would imagine but uh that that is a data point that gets used the other i think the other important fact to acknowledge is that the past was more uncertain than i think most of us care to admit what do you mean what i mean is that life is full of uncertainty and sometimes life throws actions

at us like i don't know a tech recession or a global pandemic that just reveal the tenuous impermanence of life whether it's a job or or health or whatever but sometimes we just live in blissful ignorance and when the veil of uncertainty is is uh or the veil of false certainty is cleared from our eyes we sometimes go oh maybe i should be worried about all this uncertainty but it's been with you all along yeah i mean i i guess there are always tech layoffs there just are more now but more and i mean there are more now for sure and higher profile layoffs and that the concern that i feel and i think many others do too is that when there are more layoffs happening if i get laid off i won't be able to just bounce back into a job and get a nice 15

percent raise you know yeah and then collect severance from my old job while i'm getting a paycheck with my new job and get double paid for six weeks and it's like it's just so great getting left getting laid off is the best thing that ever happened to me like maybe it won't be so great this time yeah yeah that's a fair point and and there's there's often some element of circumstances out of your control in layoffs but i feel like they're they're more that way if the economy overall is is worse it feels like it's more likely that a layoff that is not directly connected to your job performance could target you so yeah i could see that revealing the uncertainty a bit more yeah my judgment is blurred by the fear of getting

laid off i wonder what they mean there like are they less likely to propose solutions or push back in certain ways because they're worried about showing up on a list somewhere or something you know yeah maybe or maybe my judgment is blurred means i just work really hard and effectively now whereas before i used to i used to say i should look into that and i'll work i'll get it done tomorrow yeah there's a guy who looks suspiciously like the monopoly guy who's just cackling in a back room somewhere going like i love this i should have been doing layoffs more yes it's working yeah i mean to me this is this is fear like this whole question has fear just running all the way through it and and the fact of the matter is that being scared about things that

haven't yet happened does nothing but hurt you unless you prepare or change your behavior now to minimize the chance of those bad things happening. And so if you really are worried about getting laid off, try doing a really, really good job because that's the only thing that's in your control. Do a great job, do quality work, do fast work, help your teammates, help your management, make sure everyone knows what you're doing

and how good it is, you know, demo your stuff, talk to your manager and your skip level about the great contributions you made and do this consistently. And what else can you do, you know? What else can you do if something bad is happening you know if there's a threat of a layoff i have one other thing you can do so i i really like what you suggested which is um do what you can to try to reduce

the likelihood that you will be laid off you're tackling that in two ways one by saying if there is a layoff i'm i'm going to be more valuable or try to make myself more visibly valuable to the company so i'm less likely to be targeted and also like if you just do a really good job then hopefully your company does better and there's less yeah for it maybe the other thing i would try to do is find out more information to help me figure out if the likelihood of a layoff so try to gather more information so you can know how much should i be preparing like here versus kind of expanding my network and like how good of a job should i really be doing yeah yeah yeah so You tackle your own performance and you try and gather more information to figure out how likely is this.

And there's some heuristics you can use, like if your website says the word cryptocurrency anywhere or crypto or Web3. Very good chance you're getting laid off. Yeah, you add a few tens of percentages to the likelihood of layoffs. If it says anything about residential real estate? Yes. Fintech is starting to get that way a little bit too. if you recently raised like a billion dollars with like a thousand x revenue multiplier evaluation or something like that then well in that case you're fine right you spent it all your company

blew it all i'm sure i'm hyper scaling yeah that might be another sign actually if you've if you've recently like tripled the size of your company most places i have worked at have had some amount of transparency internally around how the company is doing financially. So if you feel like things that were going up and to the right are now going down and to the right, that could be a sign. Yeah, so do some investigation. And the result of that investigation should tell you, is it time to start showing up to meetups again? Do I need to change some behaviors so that if this does happen, I'm a bit more prepared than none prepared? Here's a couple of questions you could ask someone in your company, you could say, hey, what's our average cash burn rate over the

last, say, 12 months? And then in a totally disconnected conversation, maybe five days later, say, hey, how much cash do we have in the bank right now? And burn rate, by the way, is a monthly number. And then just do a little bit of math. Divide cash by burn rate. And now you know how many months until the company's going out of business. Yep. If that's a single digit then uh layoffs are probably coming yeah layoffs are coming right if it's if it's more than like 18 or 24 you're probably in pretty darn good shape yeah but if it's like six yeah you might you might be in trouble yeah i somewhat jokingly mentioned crypto although rough times for for those folks oh yeah not not totally jokingly but you can kind of look around

at competitors and see, is our industry being affected? Do we have lots of competitors who seem to be struggling or have they done layoffs? It could also be a sign that you are uniquely positioned and you're going to come through stronger than ever because your competitors are falling by the wayside, but certainly some data points. And most of the information we just shared with you is very startup centric. Like James and I both work at startups now. We've spent a lot of our career in startups you know so they won't apply to anyone who's at like a mega co or a boutique shop that's kind of in you know like self-sustaining you know this just doesn't apply um it that's not to say you won't get laid off but these are the wrong questions to ask

yeah if you if i asked at walmart hey what's our burn rate then they'd be like ha yeah what's our runway our burner i guess you could technically just read some like public documents and figure out our burn rate is negative four billion dollars a month yeah what is our runway the the heat death of the universe yeah they're like we will never die a lot of things have to die before we die although i did just hear a big retailer posted like a 90 profit reduction year over year for this quarter so like it those things are happening too so if you work for a mega public company it's actually quite a bit easier to figure this information out what is hard to figure out at a mega giant company is how to translate publicly reported financial information

to what its effect is on your team you know it's like yeah there's not a clear line connecting those things yeah if there if there are 50,000 engineers and your company is losing money what subsection of those 50 000 engineers might be targeted by cost cutting that's pretty hard to tell there's another kind of precursor to layoffs that usually happens but there's some caveats here and and the precursor is a hiring freeze you know companies that are continuing to hire obviously have either a some pretty serious confidence in their ability to pay these people or b they just haven't checked their financial statements in a little while but that's not always a solid indicator like i'm aware of one company that is doing aggressive

hiring of software developers right now but they have like a 30 percent attrition per year among software engineers so it's like they're hiring a lot of people but they're losing a lot of people but they're not laying them off per se they're just trying to keep head driving them out exactly so anyway it's hard to know if this is coming your way but if it does what are you going to do you know you're going to react when the thing happens with the conditions that the thing happens in that you won't know until it happens and you're just going to do your best and you're going to be okay you know like what's the worst that could happen you you end up starving to death on the streets of manhattan as people pass by ignoring you okay that's pretty bad

what what's the second worst that could happen what if we go one better it's summer though so you're not cold that's the second worst at least it's not winter um oh that got really morbid i'm sorry yeah i mean i have not checked this i i think that folks are still getting jobs i suspect that this this might just have some downward pressure on salary increases or benefits or or maybe there might just not be as many different options to choose from if you go back into the labor market as an engineer i guess i should probably check i don't know it's a good question for for me but i i don't get the sense that um this has become the kind of thing where you get laid off and and the regular case is you just cannot find more work i know that

that happens to some people don't want to minimize the the impact of that it's brutal but i think most of the time for the past few decades if you lose your job as an engineer it's been relatively easy to get a new one. And I feel like my gut data is telling me that it's still not dire straits to get a new job. You might take a pay cut gasp instead of a pay raise, like you said, but I don't think the worst case is you don't work anymore. I think so too. There still seems to be strong demand for software engineers. And the remotification of work from COVID, but I think works to folks' advantage here if you live outside of a major tech hub

where that's a case where I've heard it in the past can be harder to find your next job if you live in a town without a huge tech market and you're looking locally, but... It seems to be less impactful now. Yeah, I think so. Right. So don't worry about it.

That's my answer. It's fine. Don't worry about it. That's actually... The don't worry about it thing is actually the right answer, I think, in my view. As flippant as it sounds, you have to force yourself not to worry

about bad things that haven't happened yet and that you have no reason to believe that they will happen you know well not no reason okay well i mean this question asker specifically said at my company i have facts that show i shouldn't be worried but i'm worried anyway and you're like oh maybe you maybe you actually just don't have all the facts is what you're saying yeah thanks a lot jameson you're welcome i'm glad we could help this person one more thing i'll say is maybe some additional prep you could do is try to cement this idea in your mind that

your worth as a person is not determined by some organization's view of your output and I think part of what is losing your job or either getting fired or laid off in some kind of cost cutting part of what makes that painful besides

the upheaval in your life is this feeling of like I wasn't good enough like they they thought i wasn't worth it oh yeah it's it's it's hard it hurts right yeah so all you have to do is develop an unshakable confidence that you are worth it ahead of time just just perfect let it bounce easy easy yeah just squash that imposter syndrome on down here have you tried just not having that that's what actually that's part two in our seminar of no bugs that's right no bugs driven development is part one we have an upsell opportunity for you yeah which is just don't have

imposter syndrome is the name of the workshop actually anyone who disagrees with me is a hater and they're wrong but obviously that is the work of a lifetime to accomplish but but it might worth it might be worth thinking about a little bit that that i mean if this does happen yeah and i mean this is called this is resilience right like you're you want to build some resilience and that's challenging to do i mean i laid in bed last night for three hours just worrying about things that was a great use of my time but it's normal like it's normal and natural to worry about stuff that hasn't happened i have some small children i could lend you that would make it so you cannot lay in bed awake worrying about things oh man you'll either be awake trying to deal with

screaming or passed out from exhaustion there's no time to ruminate because every time i try and ruminate i fall asleep i'm just too tired to worry about anything yeah that's part three of the seminar yeah yeah you can never have insomnia if you're just too tired actually that's literally not true because that's how insomnia that's that's right that's the definition of insomnia but oh boy i gotta get out of here i am so excited to come to your company not yours jameson but our listeners and just charge them insane amounts of money to tell your engineering team to stop writing bugs and stop being imposter syndrome victims like it's gonna be great we're gonna make so much money uh and you know you might want to worry about this but all the money we take from

your company will no longer be available for labor budgets this might lead to layoffs so you're gonna is that the secret part four seminar where we just grab all the executives and say the secret to success is cutting your labor costs so you can pay the consultants more right yeah it's perfect well have we answered this question we have and we've tipped our hands so we must we must end the show before we reveal more of our hot business tips i'm sorry that you're worried about this you are certainly not alone and and do what dave said and you'll be fine that's yeah my advice in general oh oh jameson i have to say this i spent four years at a big company worrying that i was going to get fired all the time and this was before

these uncertain times. And I actually found a technique that helped that I forgot to share, which was I found that when I was helping provide feedback to management on other people, that I was less worried about getting fired myself. Meaning if management came to me and said, could you help me evaluate the contributions of these engineers? I found that when I was having those discussions i walked out with a lot more confidence hearing management and kind of seeing what they're thinking and stuff it really helped me feel like oh i'm not going to get fired tomorrow because they they trust your opinion on on whether to fire other people so you mean yeah they're asking for my they're asking for my input and we're talking about people whose contributions

haven't been great or have been great and it kind of gives you a baseline of like where is the eye of sauron pointed right now ah and if like what you know you can see what kind of stuff summons it yeah yeah exactly like what stuff summons the eye of sauron that's exactly right and and i'm like i'm not doing any of the stuff that that has summoned management's eye of sauron so i'm okay it was very very helpful it put me at ease so if you can find a way to be part of the feedback loop and and i'm i'm trying to say this in such a way that doesn't make you sound like a mole where you're like i could share all the dirt on my peers because that's not what i mean yeah they can't lay you off if you're giving them reasons to lay off everybody else yeah you can't that's

right like if you've got a good snitch you want to keep that person around yeah for this round at least but but what i do mean is if you can move into kind of a leadership capacity where you're helping management make important decisions or giving it giving important input on the contributions of your teammates without being a snitch without being a mole it can help put you at ease that management is not looking to fire you that is so interesting to me to hear you say that you were worried about getting fired all the time because when i worked at a big company for four years i looked around at at some of the people i worked with and thought i could never get fired from this job ever ever like if this is what it takes to get fired from here man or rather

if these people can stay yes yeah yeah if you can do this and still work here i'm fine i think i worked for a company that was a little bit more aggressive about letting people go than you did yeah probably that's probably fair i just had no idea i don't know well this is just me worrying irrationally just like our question has great i think it's a common problem and maybe i was irrationally not worried maybe there was maybe you should have been my head i wasn't aware of it yeah the sword of damocles hanging over yeah the excel spreadsheet of damocles yeah okay i'm sorry i swooped into the very last minute with that let's get back to the exit here i think we did we say our thing i don't know send us questions if you have them

no you thank you for doing you have to ask you have jameson you have to ask me what people can do if they want to get their own question answered i'm all flustered now what can people do if they want their own questions answered. I'm so glad you asked, Jameson. First of all, you have to ingratiate yourself with the soft skills engineering management to make sure that your question makes the cut and that you don't have to sit around worrying about whether it did. Then you can go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. And as always, we have to say thank you so much to everyone who contributes and we read them and we love, love hearing your questions. You are the lifeblood of the show. Thank you. Thank you. We will catch you next week.

We'll be right back.