Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 325: Surprise PIP and salary leak

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: ‌ I had a boss once who I was intimidated by. I did not know I was poor performing until I got a performance improvement plan. It was such a bad experience, I still feel anxiety from that day. Instead of pointing out how I can grow from my mistakes, all they did was point out my mistakes and the things I apparently was not able to deliver. And then they proceeded with reading from a pre-written list of steps to take in order to improve, right from the paper and not looking at me. It did not even feel like a two-way conversation. I felt mistreated and disrespected. I’m glad I grew from it though. I wasn’t really the person to quit when it comes to facing tough situations. I ended up staying for another year and getting almost promoted before I quit to move on to a higher paying job. It was a very redeeming process I suppose. I have been at a small startup for 3 years. We are still in startup mode, underpaid and long hours. We have two developer teams: Team A and Team B. Team A slowly quit one by one. Team B is still here, including me. After my team lead resigned I was promoted to team lead. But… one week later someone from management shared with me, I believe by accident, a file with both teams’ salaries. I was shocked, really shocked. My team, Team B, has been paid less than Team A from the beginning even though we deliver more value. Also they didn’t even try to match my salary to the previous team lead. What should I do now? Go and ask for more money? Tell them I know? Talk to the rest of the team? I cannot unsee this. I don’t want to leave because I like the project and want to observe how well our technical decisions work out after several years.

takes more than using two thousand dollars worth of monitors to render a terminal ui from the 80s to be a great software engineer this is episode 325 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 answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software engineering and ponder about the nature of of change and progress the terminal remains the same but the number of pixels greatly increased the the pixel density of the blinking rectangular carrot is just can we call that dave's law it's like moore's law but for monitors like what is it pixel density of your blinking terminal carrot will double every 18 months yeah doubles every

18 months and and implicit in that as is the idea that like there will always be a blinking carrot no matter how far we advance once we get like i don't know cerebral implants for there will still be a blinking carrot yeah you'll have a blinking carrot but it'll be blinking on your optic nerve or maybe it'll just be blinking in the back of your mind you can't even see it but you know it's there yeah subconscious and then if you ever hit the wrong key command and you hear that like terminal bell thing yeah yeah i'll just hear it inside your head but what if the wires get crossed and then you like smell it i don't know fruit punch or something oh i must have typoed again i'm smelling fruit punch yeah

oh i can tell that background job is finished because uh i just remembered that childhood memory of hugging my first dog it's the notification these are all customizable of course oh yeah i can't wait for the future sounds great i know you you'll create all these terrible you you'll pick all the worst memories how yeah how fast will they be used for for pop-up ads yeah jameson's gonna be like i have put my foot in my mouth 17 times in big public arenas i'm gonna use all 17 for my custom notifications when i make mistakes yeah yeah if the build breaks then you must be punished by remembering that time you said that horrible thing that it didn't mean to yeah

if prod goes down the alarm is you remember your worst childhood memory you show up to the on-call meeting in tears sorry sorry everyone sorry prod went down oh it just hurts so deep um do you want to thank our patrons dave yes thank you to those that are contributing at the level where we give them a shout-out every single week. They are Kent C. Dodds, Tator Saban, Memester Josh, Jenny Kim, Owen Chartle, Craig Muttlin, I Love Mavis, The Stochastic Parrot, Alice Jost, Andrew Pollack, No Cheating, Lanfuer Puelgangilik, Gogeri, Kishron,

Dorob, Willant, Silla, Gogogo, KashaktanOhio, Patreon.com.au, we're hiring, Ira Chan, MonkeyFaceEmoji, Jonathan King, TestingIsDocumenting.org, Ola Rapofari, Will Angel, who does not have the stinky feet, then who has stinky feet nick hathaway travis anders braden kane john grant nick kantor and philip jambaseel if you'd like to join this group just tape many hundreds of dollar bills to a rock and throw them through jameson's front window or go to soft skills audio and click the support us on patreon button where a certain amount of contribution will get

your name or whatever crazy word you want us to say shout it out loud every week and any amount will get you access to our slack community invitations go out at the beginning of every month thank you thank you dave i am impressed by how much work you put into pronouncing the name of that town i i get a couple syllables in and then just give up i i am still way way off just so you know you're closer than i am yeah well i guess 20 is closer than 15 yeah uh this episode is sponsored by hired which is the best way to quit your job and get a new one you can hear more about them in a little bit or you can go to hired.com soft skills do you want to read our first question dave absolutely okay this comes from an anonymous listener who said i had a boss

once who i was intimidated by i did not know i was poor performing until i got a performance improvement plan it was such a bad experience i still feel anxiety from that day instead of pointing out how i can grow from my mistakes all they did was point out my mistakes and the things I apparently was not able to deliver. And then they proceeded with reading from a pre-written list of steps to take in order to improve, right from the paper and not looking at me. It did not even feel like a two-way conversation. I felt mistreated and disrespected. I'm glad I grew from it though. I wasn't really the person to quit when it comes to facing tough situations. I ended up staying for another year and getting almost promoted before I quit to move

on to a higher paying job. It was a very redeeming process, I suppose. Huh. That's the whole, that's it there's no question but we thought it would be fun to talk about what is your favorite ice cream flavor yeah with that background what is your favorite ice cream flavor this is interesting i have a lot of reactions to this some positive and some negative yes one of the positive ones is is this sounds like the the pip success story which i think you don't often hear about often pips are this is the one time yeah where you put someone on a performance improvement plan and then their performance improves and they stay instead of quitting or getting fired so that's that's good that worked out yeah negative reactions this is

your boss screwed up and by screw up you mean didn't yeah they they looked down and read from the paper instead of staring you in the eyes while repeating the list of stuff that you need to improve on you need to make icon no they screwed up by not having this be the next step in a long conversation well not necessarily long but a continuing conversation about how you need to improve um because a pip is usually a pretty drastic step the the fact that it's felt weird is not surprising because it it involves hr and and legal requirements sometimes which means that there are some like bases your boss was probably trying to cover to make sure that that they were in the clear legally which makes it a feel a bit less humane but what i don't hear about this is

is like the conversations you had leading up to this of like tell me about how your performance is going and how do you feel it's going i've noticed there's a problem can we try and address that hey i'm telling you that this needs to improve like there's a there's a there's kind of like an escalation in my head before you get to a pip in most cases and this doesn't sound like that happened baby steps to the pip i mean on the other hand maybe that's what makes the pip this like excuse to fire people is if you say i've tried everything i can i guess it's time to pip them it's like this ultimatum you know i see i don't know anyways those are my thoughts so far what are your thoughts dave you didn't come here to listen to my thoughts

what is your what is your wisdom how about that oh well i can give you some of that fortunately it's worth exactly what you paid for it to subscribe to this podcast i you know i gotta say one thing that i really appreciated about this story was the person who got the performance plan while it was a painful experience in the moment in the end grew from it and maybe not in the necessarily in the way well maybe in addition to growing in in the way that hey i'm a better performer now but also this person i don't know just strikes me as stronger based on what they said like now kind of you know stayed for another year had grit hung on even got almost promoted not quite sure what that means but almost got a pay raise too i bet

and then ended up getting a better job which is kind of kind of a cool outcome so i like that i thought that was pretty cool yeah on the other hand painful painful experience yeah i don't know that a pip is ever a fun experience but the the abruptness of this one sounds sounds painful so i don't know if you remember this dave several years ago on this podcast i don't remember how long but i know it's been years i told you about this book called thanks for the feedback and i hadn't read it at that time oh yeah and i finally started reading it uh have you read that by the No, I think I remember you talking about it though. Yeah. Well, I talked about it without having read it. So now I'm going to talk about it, having read part of it. Okay, great. One of the

points it makes in the beginning of the book, because that's the part I've read so far, is that there's a few different kinds of feedback. There's coaching, there's evaluation, and there's appreciation. And coaching is like, I'm going to help you get better. Evaluation is, let me tell you where you stand right now. And appreciation is, I want to make you feel appreciated i guess i don't know it's right there in the word okay they all have different roles and and mixing them is tricky and if you are trying to give one and the other person interprets it as the other one then that's tricky so so what i see here is you getting a pretty harsh evaluation uh-huh which is not at least you know where you stand right it can be worse

in some ways if you don't know where you stand it was probably an unpleasant experience to to realize that but you mentioned they proceeded reading from a pre-written list of steps to take in order to improve did not feel like a two-way conversation i felt mistreated and disrespected so it felt like it then tried to pivot into coaching so like here you screwed up screwed up screwed up here's what you're doing wrong here's how much trouble you're in to not get in trouble you must do these things and the coaching was the really good part right stare it a piece of paper yeah hr gave you and read it yeah i mean that's nice work that's sort of a format dictated by the pip in a way like part of that is a here's a plan that you need to achieve

otherwise we we will know that you have not it you've not id improved the the in pip yeah you're not you've not pit you've not performance improved right but this this just illustrates how that can be hard to receive because if you're getting an evaluation especially if if it feels harsh even if it feels true to you if even if it feels like there might be some truth but it but it's hurtful it's really hard to open yourself up to say how can i get better it's hard to like i don't know it feels like an unfriendly unsafe space to to go into coaching so it doesn't surprise me that this kind of sucked for that reason too it's it's tough to mix those two different kinds of feedback yeah it's even worse to mix three though imagine if they did the crap sandwich in the pip

like hey listen i appreciate you so much for coming here well hey i i might push back on that a little bit i think if you're given someone yeah i mean if you're given someone tough feedback you may as well take it as an opportunity to articulate the things that you do appreciate about them and the things that are good because you know a lot of times it's like look you're getting on you're getting put on a pip because you are on track for termination and this is like your final warning shot that that's happening well that doesn't mean you're all bad right like surely there are effective things about you and frankly if i'm if i'm giving someone a performance plan i would want them to be aware of those things so they can double down on the things

that they're doing well saying the crap isn't isn't crap at all wait no that's not the crap in the crap sandwich is usually like the the criticism like that's the part that's going to get you fired yeah in this case right yeah and it's like i mean hey it like for example the crap sandwich you know for a pip the format could go something like this like hey we value you on this team we think you do good work but there are some areas where you need to improve i'm going to list them now for you and then at the end the other side of the crap sandwich is i have confidence that you can improve here you know because if we didn't we would just do a termination right away i mean maybe not actually that that part's kind of false i should probably retract that but like

Well, probably depends on how big your company is and how many times they've been sued for unlawful termination. Maybe I'm letting a little secret out here, but like a PIP is a legal defensive posture that protects companies from lawsuits for wrongful termination, among other things. You know, sometimes PIPs really are designed

to help people improve, but sometimes you do a PIP just to put the final documentation portfolio together so that if you do get sued, you are protected against at least losing the lawsuit because you have all your paperwork in order. And you can show that you gave them a chance to improve and that you clearly communicated the expectations. And then when those expectations weren't met on paper, you proceeded with termination, right? So that's the unfortunate kind of dark side of a PIP. Not that PIPs have a lot of bright sides, but still, I feel like even when you're in a defensive

legal posture, it is incumbent on everyone to be humane and kind. And I think that can be achieved in a PIP. Yeah. I mean, that certainly contributes to some of the negative connotations of the PIP because it's hard to say, this is us genuinely trying to help you improve. And also, this is us making sure that if you sue us, you will lose at the same time. Exactly. That's right. Those are not always compatible yeah but i think being humane and kind you can you can weave that in to everything you do yeah even if the act you're carrying out is to terminate someone like it's like look i'm going to offer as much kindness and and care as i can yeah while i'm also telling you you have you are no longer going to have this job yeah that's it's not although i gotta say

having been on the receiving end of that one time the kindness doesn't take that much of the edge off you know like it's still hurts yeah like oh i would have been hurt if you were mean and told me i was fired right like i still this year is better this year this is fine now yeah i like everything's great and i'm so glad i can pay my bills with your kindness yeah so maybe maybe we should pivot to like all right you're a manager you need to put someone on before on a performance plan how do you do it so that you don't create this kind of outcome where someone just feels so terrible and is anxiety filled every time they think about what you did to them i mean i think part of it is is regular conversations about performance before that point yes oh yeah that's that's so important

maybe the fact that it's it's gotten to a pip could be surprising to someone if they kind of think oh there's some stuff to improve but but maybe hasn't hasn't thought it is as bad as you think it is but it shouldn't be a surprise that there's stuff to improve and ideally the the things the specific items to improve shouldn't be a surprise either like ideally the pip is an extension of of conversations about improvement in those areas already it's just a little more kind of like hard hard line maybe is that the right way to put it yeah like more concrete yeah I think it's really hard. For whatever reason, it's really hard for most leaders to sit down and tell their team members that they're not performing well. And so I think people tend to avoid it. But man, do you create a problem for yourself when you avoid that conversation for too long? Yep.

On the other hand, sometimes you avoid it and the problem just goes away. Yeah. If it never worked, then we wouldn't do it, right? It has to work sometimes. it must work sometimes or else we would not we would not have evolved the desire to procrastinate exactly yeah it must have helped us escape the jaws of the lion at some point yeah yeah i i can tell you some of the pain i've experienced from doing this from from not being clear enough is uh i i begin to feel like oh this is a big enough problem that it's actually really harmful to the team and i have to make a change but but i have not laid the groundwork to feel like i'm acting responsibly to make that change and so either i have to uh be a sucky manager

and say surprise here's a pip or i have to like delay it even longer and then the the harm of their poor performance continues and don't forget the third option what's that you could just quit your job oh yeah that's how you really win the pit you make your boss quit oh man i think the worry that i have and a lot of people have is that if you're constantly giving little bits of feedback about people who are not performing the way you expect there's also a risk that that carries which is the risk is that they'll be like i'm so tired of sitting down with my boss every week and they're always telling me one thing i did wrong yeah you know you're like well look i didn't want it to be a surprise when i fired you you know it's like so i had to tell

you all these little things and like guess what they're gonna quit yeah no no you don't understand i'm making it so that when i fire you i won't feel guilty it's it's fine like it's not me being really critical and mean exactly oh i understand now yeah this feels great now so it's hard right like this is a very this is why going into management i think is so challenging because you have to navigate these super uncertain situations and it's like okay i need to give you negative feedback occasionally but not too much or you'll quit but not too little or i can't fire you right you know or yeah yeah i don't know this is why it's so important to hire the right people to begin with so that you don't have to have these awful conversations so maybe when i asked you how

to do a good pip you said give regular feedback going into it maybe pull that go even further back and say make sure to hire only excellent people who will never need to go yeah problem problem solved i think that's the answer to all of our questions that come into the show is is hire the right hire the right people slash join a company that doesn't have that problem like yeah exactly for all problems or any any problem at all yeah so there's okay there's there's have you heard that ratio of praise to criticism i just googled it and google says five to one this is probably one of those now discredited cognitive psychology papers that failed replication unreproducible yeah but there sure feels good though a lot of like clickbaity blog posts about

it so there's got to be some truth it must be true yeah yeah but i wonder if that's part of it too it's not if if every interaction with you is hey here's your here's your one piece of criticism like that i'm doling out it's like uh i'm trying to i'm trying to make you build up immunity to it or something like the poison right if maybe if you offset that by by putting in more effort on recognizing the positive contributions then that helps um put it in context so it's not the only criticism the only feedback you hear is negative like that's the only time you hear how you're doing from your bosses when they feel like you messed something up but it's it's more like this is in context with all these other things that are that are things you're doing well

yeah i think the i think the the way to summarize that is to say every team member deserves to know where they stand and if your boss is like you know super favorable on you but also know you know there's some things that you're not doing well like that's pretty cool like that i think that's a good place to be now i know where i stand do i have time to google replication the role of positivity and connectivity and performance of business teams well i could replicate it right now by giving you five compliments and then telling something telling you something that i severely dislike about you and see how you feel yeah just skip the five compliments but to save time there's actually nothing i dislike about you oh wonderful

except that one thing oh but you like at least five things about me oh yeah i mean the ratio is like at least five and it's fine all right have we answered this non-question yeah yeah i think we have okay good luck impressive response and hopefully all the managers out there now how know how to conduct a pip perfectly indeed 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 or after the finger guns?

Yeah, both. The beauty is, it's totally free for engineers. And we would love for you to go try it. Go to Hired.com slash soft skills to check it out. Hired.com slash soft skills, quit your job the best way and check out Hired. let's see do you want to read our next question jameson yes i certainly do this question is from an anonymous listener who says i've been at a small startup for three years we are still in startup mode underpaid and long hours we have two developer teams team a and team b team a slowly quit one by one team b is still here including me after my team lead resigned i was promoted to team lead but one week later someone from management shared with me i believe by accident a file with

both teams' salaries. I was shocked, really shocked. My team, Team B, has been paid less than Team A from the beginning, even though we deliver more value. Also, they didn't even try to match my salary to the previous team lead. What should I do now? Go and ask for more money? Tell them I know? Talk to the rest of the team? I cannot unsee this. I don't want to leave because I like the project and want to observe how well our technical decisions work out after several years ah you played the salary game in one player mode single player mode yeah i'm gonna waggle my finger a little bit here if your if your company's management were doing this correctly they would assume that the salary game was being played regularly among their employees like yeah you're

not going to send out this sheet of everyone's salaries most likely unless you're one of those companies that has open open pay policies which do exist most of them are not that way though but it's a legally protected right to discuss salary with your co-workers in the united states i assume it is in other places too and and i think if you generally assume that information will get around it helps create the right incentives to avoid a shocking revelation that explodes stuff it sounds like that hasn't happened right because you did see this salary sheet and and we're really shocked but i guess a lesson for the future is is whenever you're thinking about pay and kind of pay distribution across the team you should assume that that's

going to get out so minimize well there's a lot of things to optimize for one of them should be shock minimization i guess another one is like enough money so the company survives it's probably important but yeah what do you do now though yeah like there's a few really specific questions here should i ask for more money should i tell management that i know and should i tell the rest of the team these are three very good questions yeah so i'm not a mere earth layer i i think you could probably tell the rest of the team legally but i don't know i do know that would make the company grumpy at you i'm sure yeah that seems risky to me yeah but it also feels not legally yeah but i mean there's plenty of ways your job can go away that do not legally

point to this is because you told everyone on the team how much money everyone else makes i'm putting you on a performance plan yeah because i'm dissatisfied with your performance not keeping salaries secret yeah you have 30 days to invent a time machine to go back and unshare that information yeah that would be one of those pips that is a formality because it's impossible to achieve you must you must raise team morale without increasing salary costs go yeah i mean it does feel a little selfish though to say like oh i've found this information i will use it to bump up my salary good luck teammates uh fair point uh so there's a social experimenter in me who wants you to go and try to negotiate for an increased salary because now you have information

asymmetry where you know more than they think you know. Oh, and don't tell them, hey, I have this sheet that lists how much everyone makes at the company. Yeah. And it's like, you know, now you know what a reasonable request is. Yeah. Right. And maybe that reasonable request is much higher than you thought, you know? Yeah. And so maybe I would, maybe if I were in your shoes, I would consider going and asking for more money but not more than what the old team lead made and that also kind of lines up with your own you know experience and whatnot and just see like just test your company and see if they are the kind of company who will say yes that's reasonable or if they will continue to hide behind the the secrecy barrier yeah i mean there's there's

different reasons why they might say no and one of them is because they think you don't know that that's how much they paid other people right another reason genuinely could be because we believe that you are worth less money than this other person um the question asker mentioned we've been paid less even though we deliver more value maybe that's not how the people who decide how much money you make see it and that would be useful to know although unpleasant yeah and maybe you're about to learn some painful facts about their perception of you yeah i like i said about their perception of you too because it's i mean i don't know it's it's perception on both sides yeah exactly they didn't even try to match my salary so like if you're willing to kind of gamble

this by the way this suggestion to just go and ask for a raise this is like the least likely a way to get the raise you want this is the most interesting to dave though exactly like i want to hear this story more than the other the other approaches you could take if only the whole world would use that as their decision making heuristic okay i think i i have how i would approach this if i if my objective were to argue for a raise in the way that felt the most likely to happen for me but first i want to talk about is there some way you could argue for a salary increase for your team in general right so that's not the same as telling the whole team you're all way underpaid to the barricades but i guess spoiler the the i think one strategy for arguing for a raise is is

using market data it just so happens you have market data from someone with a lot of similarities to your company yeah this is market data yeah this is market data i found a comparable yeah companies in our space in our same space in the market and office building there's so much overlap yeah same website yeah do you think there's a i think there's a way that you could you could push to have salaries increased across the board using what you have seen about these salaries without disclosing that you've seen it no without disclosing to all the employees because that that's that may result in salary increases but it is an escalation for sure and and might make you seen as the dreaded not a

team player uh yes the dreaded listen if you okay let me give you my management perspective when someone comes to me and says hey i've got some firsthand perspective on the team that i'm not sure you have that you're aware of. I'd like to share this with you. The perception among the team, and I believe they are right, is that this team is underpaid. And I believe, and again, now here's where as a team lead, I think you have more voice here, but I believe that you can make a bigger chance of success if you'll put this into business speak and say, look, we've lost a lot of folks over the last little while. We've lost all of team A. One by one, they all quit. I'd like to help you prevent that from happening here with team B. And I think the best way to do that is

to give this team a pay raise and including me. I'm also on the list. Yeah. And I think that could work. And I, even though, you know, you're not tipping your hand and showing everything, you know, like, by the way, I saw the salaries and we're all 20% underpaid. And that's a major problem. I do think that you, that's not, that's actually not a compelling argument to management. you know you know that's like when my i don't want to compare working professionals to children but you know sometimes my kids come to me they they tell me that the other kid did something wrong and then when i ask that kid about it they say well the first kid did something wrong to me and i'm like oh well then everything's great you guys both did something wrong to each other so now

i'm happy right like like that's never the outcome and so if you come to a manager and basically say a wrong has been committed by this company and i want you to make it right i think they are less likely to respond by giving you what you want than if you come to them and say here's a business outcome that i think we should achieve hmm hmm i guess i'm thinking through this scenario yeah i mean part of what makes this tricky no matter what is is that money is spoken for already right like it's not like team a all quit and then they they just like invested that extra money in bonds or something it's just like sitting there ready like a low a low interest yeah account yeah like ready to go that went somewhere right it's on someone's budget

somewhere so so another important thing to realize is that this isn't like you're you're picking up free money that just is allocated nowhere like there will be a cost of of an opportunity cost at the very least of like we were going to spend this money here now this uh this team lead is advocating for a raise so we need to move it from this place we were originally going to spend it and put it into salaries for team b so i like what you said about the business case because there's presumably some value they're getting from putting it in in place not team b maybe that's like a tesla for the ceo though they already have a couple they're like i'm not gonna give that right so so maybe you've talked me down from the ideal

situation if you're just looking for a raise for yourself to say hey explain to me why i'm not making x like person like team lead a do you think you reveal that if they if they waffle on you though or if they don't uh yeah so if they say no yeah they say no like bust out the big guns we couldn't possibly afford that are you crazy nobody makes that much money yeah i'm calling your bluff that's that's above our compensation guidelines yeah i am calling your bluff yeah i'm just not that bold honestly myself i don't think i would ever reveal to anyone that i got this list in my hands really well i guess i too there are two approaches i would take both of which i think are acceptable one of which is slightly preferred approach one slightly is preferred is i would

actually probably disclose to my manager i got i just want you to know this list came to me i didn't expect to receive it and if this was a willy wonka and the chocolate factory test i hope i passed that's approach one and then approach two is i would just delete the list and pretend i never saw it and and never tell anyone about it you would delete it oh i would immediately like put it on a flash drive or i don't know yeah print it out and put it in the safe yes print it out and put it where i put all my precious stuff on post-it notes taped to my monitor along with my passwords i cannot unsee this there is i mean we've talked about the salary game and and it's interesting because there's not another person on the other side of this that you exchange

salaries with but that is one of the risks that like someone gets grumpy because they feel like they are undervalued now and and it's like you played the salary game with all of team a and so you get to decide what to do about it yeah it is weird how suddenly enough money becomes not enough money as soon as you find out there are other numbers out there yeah time machine also a time machine as usual

yes well have we answered this I think it's good enough that's as good as it's going to get from these two yes just like maybe your salary at this company oh that was that was harsh I hope this goes well I hope it works out well for you yeah good luck what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to

softskills.audio and click the ask a question button thank you so much to everyone who submits questions each week we really appreciate them we do we will catch you next week