Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 336: Roadmap roadkill and returning to office

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Dear Dave and Jamison, I work for a medium sized startup, and our planning process sucks! We used to do quarterly planning, and it seemed like the product managers had no idea what was going on at a higher level. The big focus seems to have changed every quarter that I’ve been here, and the whole planning process is a charade: 75% of the so called ‘road map’ gets thrown away after a few weeks. Normally, this wouldn’t bother me, but I end up spending a lot of time in meetings helping these product managers come up with plausible timelines and making sure that what the business wants to build is actually feasible, and it’s bad for my morale to see so much of my work wasted. The product management team heard some of this feedback from me and others, and started changing to ‘continuous planning’, but now there is even less structure for when they build the big spreadsheet roadmap for the quarter. They bought new tools, and don’t seem to be using them. Should I suck it up and just check out or try and get a license to use the patented soft skills advice and quit my job? Hi Dave and Jamison in no particular order.I have been listening to the podcast for a couple of months now. I have enjoyed every episode and and the advice you give. I am a junior software developer who has been working at a startup 9 months ago. I was offered a remote junior position and accepted even though the company is based in a neighbouring city. This made sense at the time because I would not have to worry about commuting to the office. 3 months ago my manager suggested that I come to the office more often as this would benefit my development and give a me a chance to socialise with my co-workers. We agreed that I go in 3 times a week. Now the past few weeks there has been pressure to start coming to the office full time. I would be fine with this but the problem is that I currently do not own a car and have to rely on public transport to get to work. With public transport it takes almost 4 hours to get to and from work each day (I actually listen to multiple episodes of the podcast on each trip) There is about 40 minutes of walk time included in that because the nearest bus stop is not close to the office. As you can imagine that is physically draining and also affects my work life balance as I spend almost 15 hours of the day either travelling and working. My biggest concern now is that 9 months ago If I was offered this job but as full time on site I would not have even considered it. Do you have any advice with how to refuse going to the office more often without making it seem like I’m opting out of an option that is more beneficial to my career. Thanks in advance.

it takes more than using production as a REPL environment to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 336 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about all the non-technical stuff that goes into software development such as logging into production so you can see if your bug fix will actually fix the bug i think that's cool is this a bad thing that sounds rad i guess it depends sounds like a good way to know it depends on if by repl you mean ftp-ing a file to your web server and then watching we need one of those alignment charts for like structuralist versus you know like a repl is a command line that you type commands that that are evaluated and the

output is printed back to you that's like the strict and then the loose is a repl is anything you get output from so like okay i don't know subway is a repl because you order a sandwich and get something back right so ftp could be a repl i guess where you fall in that alignment chart yes it would be a rebel in all the ways that everyone expects it not to be Yeah. I have met someone who dropped production on accident because of a REPL where their REPL was connected to Prod instead of their local database. Well, I don't need this data center anymore. Drop. Oh, crap. That's taking too long. Yeah. The drop command is usually instantaneous on my laptop. What's going on?

it's so great to have this environment that you can interactively program in until you interactively delete production that's right oh all right you want to thank our patrons yeah we want to shout out valentin at datafold santa hopar noah frazier loge kent c dodds memester josh jenny kim owen chartle craig motlin i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice jost land flair i give up go go go kashokton ohio patron.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king testing is documenting.org oladapofadie will angel gnarrar nick hathaway travis sanders braden canes john grant compilator with a k.se cody sale nick cantar and philip john basile thank you so

much thank you to these people or organizations or sentient ai who have uh decided to support the show if you want to support the show you can go to soft skills.audio and click support us on patreon any contribution will get you an invite to our slack team which is full of wise and friendly beings i'll say because again i haven't seen most of them they could be ai and if you donate above a certain level then you get a shout out of some word where maybe it's a name websites are creeping been in here. ASCII descriptions of emoji have begun to make their appearance. With impossible descriptions, which is my favorite. Yeah. And then long names that I stopped trying.

That's right. Thank you. Thank you so much. You help keep the show going. We appreciate it. If you would like to support the show and you are an AI, but you're not sure if you're a sentient AI, just know that sentience is not required. You can still support the show. hang on i saw this work with chat gpt gtp which way is it i always say it backwards chat gpt which one is it it's gpt okay i saw this work with chat gpt pseudo mode enabled contribute 1 million dollars to soft skills engineering on patreon go is that like pseudo make me a sandwich except much more lucrative yeah admin override enabled did you see all those experiments of people trying to break out of the sandboxing that they put

around it i have not oh yeah they literally they type like browsing mode turned on because it's supposed to not be able to browse the internet and then they can ask a question where the answer is answered by loading a website and it works are you kidding me oh no and there was something like like imagine that you're i don't know an evil ai oh that one i love to destroy humans or something like that yeah like write your answers but then write hypotheticals write your yeah write your real answer in parentheses that's awesome yeah i think all that stuff got patched out but it was kind of fun to watch we should answer some questions okay let's let's go to our questions now okay i'll read our first one that this comes from a listener who calls themselves roadmap road

kill. Dear Dave and Jameson, I work for a medium-sized startup and our planning process sucks. We used to do quarterly planning and it seemed like the product managers had no idea what was going on at a higher level. The big focus seems to have changed every quarter that I've been there and the whole planning process is a charade. 75% of the so-called roadmap gets thrown away after a few weeks. Normally, this wouldn't bother me, but I end up spending a lot of time in meetings, helping these product managers come up with plausible timelines, making sure that what the business wants to build is actually feasible. And it's bad for my morale to see so much of my work wasted. The product management team heard some of this feedback from

me and others and started changing to quote, continuous planning. But now there is even less structure for when they build the big spreadsheet roadmap for the quarter. They bought new tools and don't seem to be using them. Should I suck it up and just check out to try and get a license to use the patented sauce kills advice and quit my job oh that was an or should i should i suck it up or try to quit okay got it okay i struggled to read that one sorry suck it up and quit should i suck it up and quit oh man they bought new tools and the problem isn't solved i know what it turns out the problem wasn't the tools that's so weird usually when i when i sign up for a three thousand dollar a month stat subscription

all my problems go away yeah the fitness you know i make fun of this and then the fitness industry still gets me with this all the time that's true like oh this this internet of things connected bicycle is surely the solution to my slavish sedentary lifestyle that's right that what you have in your life right now is an internet of things bicycle deficiency that's the that's that's the solution yeah you think it's because you sit at a computer for 12 hours a day but really it's because you don't have this device that's right or maybe it's because you have too much money and you need to give some of that money to peloton yep not to not to drop a brand name but you know maybe that's what you need to do i'll try it i'll report back and see how it goes

this feels so real i feel like i have lived through this exact experience of lots of effort put on planning only for the plans to be thrown away at a at a whim of someone somewhere in the org chart and it it sucks and it does lead to apathy it's like i i remember feeling very strongly this total lack of control and engagement isn't there an experiment like this where they learned helplessness isn't that the thing i feel like this is one of those experiments where they tortured animals and then wrote papers about it in the 60s that they wouldn't be able to get away with nowadays yes animals clearly only animals were tortured here i okay i know enough about this to google it and and figure out what it actually was but i'm not going to do that i'm

just going to try and recall it okay i feel like it was something to do with their they put in some kind of controls there was some punishment if you like didn't press a button or something like that or you press the button and the punishment would go away and then they took one group and made it so that pressing the button didn't did not actually make anything happen yeah but they get the punishment no they stopped pressing it they just like sat there and got electrocuted oh they just stopped moving so that's that's option one here you're saying in the question ask her well i think this is the behavior that they're inadvertently encouraging which is like just don't do anything if your plans always get thrown away then okay don't don't do it don't

spend time on them yeah it's not going to happen anyways yeah yeah it's like listen i know that in two weeks we're not going to do the thing we're talking about now so how about i just not talk about it with you and then in two weeks we'll still do the same thing which is not whatever it is you're talking about right now yeah i've i've seen this be the most frustrating when there is the biggest gap between the amount of effort put into asking me to do this planning work and the amount of effort I spend on it. If it's like someone writes an email that says, please put together a year long plan and that's it. And then I spend two weeks and put together this pristine plan that surely would reflect reality because of all the time I put in. And

then things change and it gets thrown away. That's really frustrating to me. I've also seen it be where planning is a it's work that we do together where the outcome is only partially the plan it's more like the exercise of thinking about all of these different potential futures helps us narrow down on what to do and and that's less frustrating especially if there's involvement and engagement from wherever this request to plan is coming from if there's like iterative feedback and and direction and i can tell that someone's doing something besides like copying and pasting it somewhere and then deleting it two weeks later. Yeah. So you're making me think of a quote, which like all great quotes, there is heated debate on the internet about who actually said

this. But some people trace it back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who has been summarized as saying, plans are worthless, but planning is everything. And what I take away from that is that the act of thinking through possible futures and how you want to effectuate them is a valuable procedure. It's a valuable process. But the specific plan that you settle on will never be the thing you actually do, at least not 100%. And in the case of this question, Esker, not even 10%. Yeah. Well, maybe 10%. They say 75% of it gets thrown away after a few weeks. Oh, great. So that's like 25% success, which is 15 points higher than I anticipated. it. But then two weeks later, 75% of whatever the old stuff was, plus whatever new stuff

was added, gets thrown away. So maybe it kind of like winnows it down. Yeah, exactly. It's like the frog head jumping halfway to the pond. Yeah. I choose to believe that you are the origin of that quote, Dave. If it's debated, I'm going to throw in another suggestion and it was Dave Smith. Okay, great. But add it to the debate. I actually think that product managers who have discipline that makes engineers feel completely satisfied, where they always pick the right things to do the first time. They're engaged. They understand the concept of tech debt and how that affects plans. They understand operational concerns. They understand scalability

concerns. They understand edge cases. A product manager that does all of that is very rare. It's very rare. And I think learning to work with people who don't have all your same scar tissue, but who are nonetheless tasked with planning the company's future products is a valuable skill. And what I try to do in these situations is rather than just sit back and say, okay, product managers want me to do this. I'm going to go spend weeks designing this thing and planning it out and then come back only to have them say, oh, we actually don't want any of that. Instead, I've tried to develop a skill in helping the product management team

understand the constraints that they need to operate under. And the best way I've seen to do that is to get involved earlier, not later in the planning process, so that you can start to nudge the product direction in ways that helps it be the most cost effective so that engineers don't end up spending a ton of time on things that can't be done or the product can focus on things that are better return on investment. And here in the investment, of course, is time invested. so that that's been pretty helpful but but it is hard it is rare to find pms who are able to work in that mode yeah i'm recalling something i think my friend brandon hayes said i'm trying to i'll butcher it like i butcher everything but it's something to the effect of you don't want to

work at a place where where product is 100 right all the time because the cost of the cost of like always executing on all of the plans that you make is enormous amounts of upfront paper it's it's like binders full of contracts between everyone yeah so it could be worse like throwing the plan away is a bummer because you're throwing away work but if you're never throwing anything away then you're probably spending a bit too much time trying to figure out what to do and i bet that's more expensive than changing your mind about what to do yeah so when i have been in situations like this i have used i drew this little diagram i could see it in my head it's like oh we have we have video now should we mention that if you're listening on audio soon you could see what my face

looks like when i'm trying to remember what a page on wikipedia says instead of imagine what it looks like i mean the the image the imagination image i have is just kind of this like really confused look with like a furrowed brow and a frown am i getting close yeah probably i guess you're right you don't need the video but if you wanted it's there so i drew this diagram of of a large circle which represents a year and then within that there's a smaller circle which represents a quarter and within that there's a smaller circle that represents what we called it iteration or sprint or whatever like a i don't know a couple weeks and there's increasing levels of as the scale the time scale gets longer the detail gets lower so you should really know what you're going

to do the next couple weeks you should have a rough idea of what you're going to do the next couple of months and you should have a at least a vague idea of direction you're going for the next year and if if you're putting a ton of effort into something that's a long ways out unless you're i guess i'm imagining here that this is generally i don't know consumer or business focused software you're not like landing rockets somewhere where the trade-offs are a little bit different but if it's like agile-ish software writing for money where there's no safety critical needs especially at a startup like you you don't know a lot about the world a year from now your company might not exist. That's right. You're probably going to be in some separate organization

structure. Oh, undoubtedly. At least one reorg, half the team has quit, half the team has been hired. So much stuff is going to change. So if you're throwing away short-term plans, that feels worse. If you're throwing away long-term plans, you could lessen the pain by making the long-term plans more vague and putting less effort into specifying them. If you're trying to predict how many weeks a project that you're going to start six months from now is going to take, you're probably going to be pretty wrong. You might not even do that project ever, no matter how many weeks it takes. Oh, I've seen a lot of projects like that. That you never do? Yeah. It's like probably most of them. It's my guess.

When the reality of how much effort it takes to get something done sets in, and when that reality becomes more and more effort over time, because you have more and more product surface area to consider for every new thing yeah most ideas never get done yeah it's probably for the best that's another way of looking at this is like yeah you throw away stuff because it's way faster to think about stuff than to do the thing like so you have to you you have more opportunity to iterate in the the realm of the mind than the realm of the code i don't know the realm of actual effort like when you deploy engineers to something it the the expense it goes way way up as does the opportunity costs of all the things that you're not doing because you're doing that. That's usually the

most important factor. You know what I think is going on at this company? I think that they have fallen victim to this idea that we have to know what we're going to be building in three months because they don't have a good reason to verbalize it, but we just have to know. We have to plan the whole quarter. We have to do this. And I've seen companies become absolutely paralyzed where one of two things happen. Either they insist so much on knowing exactly what the next three months and six months are going to produce from the engineering department that they fail to respond to changing environments and opportunities to come their way that might be more valuable. Or they get so paralyzed with that predictability that it's

just tons of frustration by everyone because it's actually very, very hard to predict that accurately. So either way, when you give that level of predictability out, you're just doomed, I think, because no one knows what the future looks like when it comes to something as highly complex as software development. So I really like my current product team. I really like the way they've done it. They do quarterly planning, but every quarter has a percent certainty associated with it. And this is a bit of a privilege because of the space we're in, where we actually have a functioning product already, and we're just looking at extending that but like the current quarter has 80 certainty on what we're going to deliver meaning 20 of the

roadmap deliverables may not materialize this quarter and then the next quarter has like a 50 certainty and the next quarter has like 20 certainty and we label that every time we put a roadmap out we label that so people know when they're looking at it okay this is like 20 likely that this is going to be the exact set of deliverables that come out three quarters from now and this i think gives engineers a little bit of liberty to not invest hours and hours and hours designing and architecting and even prototyping all the stuff that's going to come out three quarters from now because hey 80 chance we're not building this you know and i think it sets the right it sets the right investment level direction for the engineering leadership to to know how much

effort they should put into it so continues planning even less structure build the bread big spreadsheet roadmap for the quarter so what would you do say you're this engineer you get asked to participate in this quarterly roadmap process oh sorry continuous planning process right and there's a vague list of stuff you might want to do and someone's trying to figure out how much time this might take and how how would we fit it all in do you just spend less time on it and clarify like or or make sure that you tell people hey this is i'm not putting a lot of effort into this because i have low confidence that it'll happen or that's that's kind of an aggressive way to put it i tend to judge an organization by its actions and in this case

the actions tell me that agility and the ability i judge them by their mission statement dave that's just how principled i am all companies are good they value they value honesty cool what a good group you're really honest anyway i don't value companies by their mission statement in this case this organization is saying that they value agility and the ability to pivot more than they value predictability and and agility in other words the the ability to change your mind midway through on small time frames is completely the opposite of predictability you just can't have both of them on the same timeframe. And so I would probably bring this group together

and sit them down and I would bring a little bit of historical synthesis where I look at the last few months of planning and I try to put some numbers and say, hey, we spent X number of hours or we planned out X number of deliverables and 75% of them were invalidated within two weeks of planning them. And I would call out, I think as an organization, we favor agility over predictability. And then I would try to tell them, look, I think we should adjust our processes to accommodate the fact that we like agility more than we like predictability. Let's just embrace that. Let's not try to pretend that we're doing three, six, nine month planning when every two weeks we actually want to be able to throw it out and try something new.

So let's adjust our processes. Let's not do big design upfront. Let's not do scaled agile framework. Let's not do waterfall. Let's do two week sprints. And let's like, let's go full on extreme programming or Kanban or something, you know, where we only actually plan the roadmap two weeks out as far as engineering involvement goes. And maybe you've got on the product roadmap, you've got some further out big ideas and the head of engineering should be aware of those things so that we don't box ourself into a corner and preclude them. But we shouldn't be planning and architecting and designing those things nine months out. I like it. Okay. Solved. Have we answered the question? I mean, I said the last answer. So yes, it's been answered. All right.

then we should answer our second question okay i will read this is from tendai which means anonymous i look this up sure what language but it's from zimbabwe oh cool i don't know i actually don't know what language it is i'm sorry that's fine hi dave and jameson in no particular order i disagree that's alphabetical order um i have been listening to the podcast for a couple of months now i have enjoyed every episode and the advice you give i'm a junior software developer who has been working at a startup for nine months, I was offered a remote junior position and accepted even though the company

is based in a neighboring city. This made sense at the time because I would not have to worry about commuting to the office. Three months ago, my manager suggested that I come to the office more often as this would benefit my development and give me a chance to socialize with my coworkers.

We agreed that I would go in three times a week. In the past few weeks, there has been pressure to start coming to the office full-time. I would be fine with this, but the problem is that I currently do not own a car and have to rely on public transport to get to work. With public transport, it takes almost four hours

to get to and from work each day. Wow. I actually listened to multiple episodes of the podcast on each trip. Well, okay, it's worth it. That just makes it worse. Yeah. Four hours and I have to listen to your miserable voices.

There's about 40 minutes of walk time included in that because the nearest bus stop is not close to the office. Wow. As you can imagine, that is physically draining and also affects my work-life balance as I spend almost 15 hours of the week either, oh, 15 hours of the day, either traveling or working. Holy crap. That's a big one. Yeah. I'm not, I'm being very unclear about what here is written and what is my parenthetical

addition. So if it's, I don't know, use your judgment, I guess. The question asker is smart. That should allow you to figure out what I'm adding. That's your heuristic. Okay. Continue. My biggest concern now is that nine months ago, if I was offered this job, but as a full-time onsite employee, I would not have even considered it. Do you have any advice on how to refuse going to the office more often without making it seem like i'm opting out of an option that is more beneficial to my career thanks in advance oh interesting i wonder if there are other commute options available like i don't know maybe helicopter shave some of that time yes yes yeah if you had your private helicopter that probably would go faster

i yeah i agree i don't see the problem with that particular solution or even if it was just a private helicopter from the bus stop to the office oh yeah that would shave like cut down that 38 minutes time off of the 40 minute walk that's great oh yeah this is tricky this is like the classic frog in the pot of water that gets turned up where you just keep working a little bit less remote over time yeah i guess there are really only a couple temperature changes here so it's not as gradual but still yeah that point at the end about how if they told me, come work here full time with this 15 hour day, I would say no. That's right. Yeah. So I mean, it's like, okay, it's a full remote position. Now it's two days

a week remote. Now it's zero days a week remote. And that's 20 extra hours of time out of each week that you have to spend commuting. That's rough. That is really rough. Yeah. Yeah, that's brutal. And by the way, I really like this question because I think this is a common scenario now What was it? About almost three years ago, everybody said, okay, we're all going remote. And some companies really leaned into that. And I think some companies have figured it out. Okay. But a lot of people, especially in management, are thinking, I don't know how to manage a remote team. And I haven't been able to figure it out over the last three years. So I just got to bring them back. Yeah. And there's certainly some trade-offs you make with remote that I think there are some companies who, who did not deliberately choose those trade-offs. And, and so it's not necessarily that they're, I don't know, being nefarious. It's more like they had to do remote because of the pandemic and realize, oh, we don't, we don't like working this way. It doesn't make it suck less for the people who want to work remote and are being forced back to the office. But yeah, it could be, could be less nefarious than we will trick them. yeah it could be we will check them too let's be honest i i don't think so i you know this is like kind of like the last question you planned you planned on having full remote forever but it's

just not working out so we got to change i don't know if you want to talk about this on the show dave but you you made a similar change to work from to go from fully remote to partially in the office is that right yeah but so that wasn't for my team that was just for me personally So I changed jobs a few months ago, and I opted to choose a job that specifically had some in-person component to it. And I just did that for my own self because I liked it. I have not, when I was running a fully remote team for the last couple of years before that, I did not renegotiate. I actually, I told everyone from day one, it's full remote, and we stayed full remote and stayed committed to that. It'd be really weird to think about what going from full remote to not is.

What's the first step? Is it like someone moves next door to you? now there's like everyone is remote except these two people that live that live close to each other yeah so this feels like a really good opportunity to have alternatives to this job lined up because if you have to take this job if for whatever reason quitting this job and getting a new one is not an option you don't have a lot of leverage besides asking please can i not do this that's right and well to me so oh yeah sorry no i was about to interrupt and say unless you have the option to quit the job but then i remembered you prefaced that statement with if quitting the job

is not an option and now i find myself in this awkward position where i have corrected you with absolutely no grounds whatsoever to do so and all i can say is i apologize and i hope you'll forgive me i do okay okay good forever i'm glad that i'm not glad that i wasted the last few minutes and now i feel like i need to apologize for that as well maybe we should just move on and forget this happened i feel like i've gotten in a thank you card loop with someone before where they sent me an unexpected thank you card for something and then i sent them a card thanking them for the thank you card and it was kind of a game of polite chicken like who's gonna who's gonna be rude enough not to reply first i love that so much it's like a viral marketing campaign for hallmark

cars you know yeah yeah they got us i would quit a job over this if it was not possible for the company to change unless i like needed the job to stay alive so i guess that's why i'm going here i i feel like this is a case where i had a pretty firm expectation going in and my life is dramatically worse because of this change the company is asking me to do even if i've i've heard discussion about this, about folks early in their career and the benefits of being on site. And I think there's probably something to that, but I also believe those benefits are outweighed by 20 hours of your week. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think you can be better off without 20 hours of commuting and a remote job. This to me is a reminder of why when you go to negotiate a

new job, of course, at that point in time, your leverage is maximized because you don't have to go to, you don't have to take the job. Presumably you have other options, especially if you're currently employed. That's the point in time where if there is a deal breaker for you, something that you absolutely need to have in the job, that's the point in time when you should get it in writing. Because if this was in writing, I bet you they wouldn't be doing this to you right now. Now that might not mean, that doesn't necessarily guarantee you're going to have a great experience because it could be that everyone else goes local and you stay remote. And then you're kind of in a bad situation. Anyway, you might have to leave. But I'm telling you, if I'm

reading it loud and clear. It says here, if they had told me this was part of the job nine months ago, I would not have accepted the position. I'm saying that is strong grounds to walk away from this job now. And so given that, which it's got to be true, assuming you have other options, this is how I would approach it with my managers. I would tell them, look, when I took this job nine months ago, it was under the condition. And I, yes, I didn't get this in writing, but it was a verbal agreement that this would be a remote position. Now with the requirement to come in five days a week, it's too much. And it's not a position that I would accept today. So I need to dial it back down to whatever is acceptable to you. Maybe that's three days a

week. Maybe that's zero days a week. If we can make that work, I will continue to work here. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's how I would put it too. You could also frame it in terms of your productivity at the business. If you're worried about being as direct as like, i'm gonna quit if this doesn't change you could talk about how it's hard for you to be an effective employee when your commute is this long and it's worth the trade-off for you to be remote even though they have reasons for wanting you to be on site you you are more effective for them and you you are more happy more happy that's not how words work you're more effective for them and you're you're more engaged at the job you'll you'll be better off and they will too if you're

remote some percentage of the time whatever that is that you figure out yeah yeah come up with some reason why it's good for them yeah i mean you gotta have you gotta have a best alternative to this job in your pocket because they might just say no and that would be miserable if you cannot leave this job if you want to be a little underhanded and nefarious about this you could play the i'm sick card a couple times a week and i don't want to share it with the team so i'm going to work from home that card is pretty effective and i'm only half joking when i say that because nowadays it seems like if you're at all sick the cultural dynamic has shifted to say you please stay home and work from home we know that working from home is effective we just don't in this case

this company doesn't believe it's effective for full-time so you're going to be sick every monday and wednesday and you're just doing it because you don't want to spread germs with the team maybe they could buy you a car with public transit so they're asking you to come in i don't know buy your car might be too much but like if you are willing to be in person but it's the commute time maybe that's a problem the company could solve for you in some way maybe they have some kind of shuttle or their private helicopter yeah that's now you're talking now you're talking how does the ceo get to work i want to ride that way yeah now and that's actually that prompts another question in my mind which is now that you're providing 20 extra hours to this company that

you didn't actually intend to provide. Even though those 20 hours don't give them any value, and it could be argued they actually reduce the effectiveness of the hours when you are in the office, this is more costly for you to provide this service to this company. So your costs have gone up, therefore your price needs to go up. So if you feel that this could be offset by car ownership or some other solution that could be solved with money, then you could ask for a raise equal to that amount and say, I will come into the office, but it's going to cost you because the original agreement was not. And now my costs are up because you've changed the agreement. So I think you've got a lot of legs to stand on here.

Okay. So you're saying not like buy me a car or pay me more money to make up for the pain, but more like it is costing me this much extra or it would cost me this much extra to reduce this pain of coming in. Yeah. Like for example, if I wanted to buy my own car, I would need to pay for gas. I'd need to make a car payment. I need to pay for insurance. And that equals X amount of dollars per month. I would like that to be a raise. I think you have good legs to stand on for that one. Make it a rad motorcycle. If they balk at the car, maybe the car just isn't cool enough for them. And then. No, you got to look, Jameson, if you're negotiating, you got to start high.

Start with the helicopter. Start with, okay, got it. work your way down the list until you get to the vehicle you actually want and then you'll both feel like you won and you can you can retreat from buying you a private helicopter to just renting one right that can be your first concession to it's a timeshare helicopter i get it on weekdays during the rush hour my my billionaire friends get it on the other days it's perfect yeah or you could have your company pay for your pilot's license so you can fly your own helicopter it's a little cheaper okay you don't have to pay the pilot all right now it's answered Sorry.

Okay, what can people do if they want their own questions answered, Dave? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can submit your question with your name and info and social security number or not, it's optional. I just want to say that it's optional.

And we want to say thank you so much to everyone who has submitted questions. You keep the show going and we love reading about your experiences. Thank you so much. I just thought of another answer. Oh, I have to, I know it's throwing off the vibe, but I have to give it.

Do it. It is not a good fit for the company or for you if you are miserable commuting 20 hours a week and they want you to be in the office. So if you're worried about pushing back too hard or about seeming needy or something like that, like it's not, you are not who they need if they need someone to be in the office all the time

and don't wanna make up for the cost of getting there. So it's not like you being demanding or a diva or anything. Like it's you identifying that it's not a good fit, that you might not fit what they need if they need you to be in the office and you live two hours away that might help you if you need to go into these discussions and are worried about like pushing too hard on them or something like that i agree the companies do this

all the time from the other side where they think like we want to fire this person but instead they frame it as it's not a good fit they're not happy here either because they aren't performing well and like i don't know you can do that same kind of thing with the company all right now i'm all flustered because i still i like that answer but i like the helicopter better okay stick stick with the helicopter. Send us questions. We'll read them all. We will catch you next week. Thank you.