Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 35: Attracting Talent and Quitting Responsibly

Episode Date: November 15, 2016

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How can I attract talent? How do I quit without burning bridges?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, episode 35. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I am your worst nightmare, Jameson Dance. I don't know, I just wanted to say something besides host. I'm your host. You're my worst nightmare host. The nightmare host.

You're my sweet dream host, Jameson. Aw, thanks. Well, this episode today is made possible by the good people over at Dev Mountain, and we'll be hearing more about them later. Thanks for the Ferrari, by the way. You only got a Ferrari? Cheap. Oh no, did they cut a separate deal with you?

I'm not going to say. Okay. Let's just say you could park your Ferrari in my deal. Sweet. All right, do we have any questions this week? I have a lot of questions now. but yes we have some soft skills question this one's pretty short how do i attract talent that's it yeah that's it all right that's it attracting talent um if it's magnetic talent i think you

could use a ferrous material yeah like for for i don't know maybe you have robot engineers and they are magnetic somehow they're made of iron yep you can attract them with a magnet yeah okay what else what else that's the only that's the only way i know how to do it okay i mean children and also myself are very attracted to sugar you can use sugar to attract talent and ants wait do you have to do you have to attract the talent or do you have to attract the person who has the talent oh yeah what if you just yeah this sounds like the plot from a children's cartoon in the 80s what if you just steal all the talent and you put it in a ring and you wear the ring that might work um besides that so well dave you

should give your your cred you have a lot of uh you have a pedigree about this and i want to hear it so I know how much attention to pay to the stuff you say. Well, if you have to ask how much attention to pay to me, I think you already know the answer. So I've been interviewing and hiring engineers. Well, okay. I've been interviewing engineers for the last 15 years, pretty much solid. I've been formally making offers and hiring engineers for the last two years, which means I was kind of the final decision maker and i actually made the offers and stuff um and i've probably i've grown teams from like 25 engineers to over 100 and from at one company and then from about three engineers to about 30 at another company so i've definitely seen my share of talent coming

into teams yeah i've i've been involved at a much different level i i've been interviewing engineers for most of my career i haven't been as much on like the side where i'm solely responsible for building the team kind of like you were but i oh but i wouldn't say i was solely responsible by the way it's you carried that team on your back okay well you you know what i mean and i've also just kind of recruited and referred a lot of people uh as as just a regular old employee trying to get people i want to work with to work there so the number one thing i think you need to do to attract good engineering talent is you actually have to make it a great place to work you just can't fake that and like that's number one so if you have this really if you work for

a really terrible company and you're like how can i attract talent to come work with me in this awful situation there's no advice i can give you actually no there is one piece of advice it's the same thing we always fall back quit your job and get a new one and then attract talent to that other job i just want the salt mines to be a little less lonely though is that too much to ask yes okay oh boy so that's the long that's like the big underlying foundational point is that you have to make it a good place to work and then uh after there are many many other points yeah lead from that um and that's probably the hardest thing to achieve but because first of all it takes like full buy-in from the company not just engineering but like the whole company has to be in on that

and secondly because it actually means different things to different people you know yeah like jameson for example he requires a ball pit i do and that turns a lot of people away believe it or not not everyone is uh not everyone's there yet not everyone's on the next gen yeah i'm i'm over switching javascript frameworks every year i switch which perk is required every year that's a good point though to talk about perks a little bit there there are all these trappings of of a good place to work either um they've just kind of acquired the the notion that like oh if you have a ping pong table that means you're cool or if you have great snacks or a chef or someone that does your laundry or or i don't know they're all these kind

of they're they're very easy to put into place and they're very visible and so they often get identified as things that make good culture things that make a place great to work and i was kind of like grumpy about them and i've mentioned this before that they they can be distracting and some people find them annoying and whatever but you said something really interesting before the show um about how they reflect kind of an underlying desire do you remember what i'm talking about yeah i think they can be a signal of good things happening at the company for engineers because they can indicate that a company is willing to put their money where their mouth is you know if they say hey we we want to make this a great place to work for engineers but then they

don't invest money into that because really at the end of the day business only speaks one language and that's money anything else has no meaning to the business as far as like actually expressing its desire to do something for you you know so it's like yeah we want to be a great place for engineers but we're not going to invest in any perks of any kind for you yeah that may or may not be a bad signal but if they do say yeah you know what we're going to have some nice things for you here at the office that says something it's not necessarily a hundred percent predictive but it at least says something my hang up with them is it's so easy to have a terrible place to work that also has a ping pong table they're so superficial that if you use them as signals for

good culture it's it's really easy for people to fake that signal yeah it absolutely is and i recently took a job where there are basically no in-office perks like there's no ping pong table there's no treats there's no doggy kennel grooming station yeah no no stand-up pup when it comes to all your stand-up meetings he's a scrum service dog how can you live without your service dog so so i think service dogs are a real thing scrum service dogs are not that's a real thing so i i think that the absence or presence of a ping pong table or a or a pinball machine or candy are is really no indicator at all um but it might now that's i guess that's kind of the opposite of what i just said basically the presence of those things might indicate good

things but they might not so i guess what i'm saying is they really can't you just can't use them as a as a decision maker yeah i i'm i'm a little jaded by them because i've seen companies that are not places i would want to work use them to counterfeit cool and and and what makes me sad is it sometimes works and convinces people but i don't know yeah but i don't know i enjoy a to ping the pong every once in a while too i've been known to ping a pong in my day all right so what about the interview process you're you're getting close to kicking off a rant it's all garbage never interview anybody and that's the only way we can be sure basically believes you can't determine whether someone's a good engineer during an interview i i don't know if that's what i believe

but i i hate the interview process as it exists yep but uh what expound on your point what do you mean the interview process so i have seen at three different companies from multiple different people all tell this same story, which is that, and as strange as this sounds, that if you have a rigorous, challenging interview process, that afterward, people who take your job and who had other offers at other places will sometimes say that the reason they took your job is because they felt challenged by the interview. And that was a positive signal for them. I've heard it time and again. Has this happened to you too? Yeah, on both sides of that coin. So I've had jobs where i got the interview took the interview it was extremely rigorous and i felt challenged

and i felt like okay i gotta go work there um almost like i had earned something and now i had to accept the offer you know it's kind of a weird psychological effect and i've also uh participated in interviews where um it's too easy you know and i'm like well aren't you gonna ask me challenging things to figure out if i know my stuff and it also makes me think well who else kind of kind of skirted the process or just like slipped through here am i gonna have to work with people who kind of don't know what they're doing like i want to work with people who are inspiring and smart and can teach me things um and i and i also like working with people who are inexperienced and i like helping to mentor like it's not like i will only work with people more experienced than

me but um i don't want to work with people who are uh i don't want to use a euphemism here but what some people might call dead weight which is a term that i hate but i can't think of a better synonym for it sure i haven't had the experience of an interview process was so rigorous and i barely passed it and that made me really excited to join but i have had the opposite where i they just had no idea if i could actually do the job or not but somehow they they wanted me to work there and i yeah that i agree with you on that it reflects poorly right yeah to me it does um i think the if we assume that we live in a magical fairyland where a really intense interview process means you hire really talented people i think that can be another um really powerful

thing to attract um other talented people is uh they they want to work together so if you can say our team is amazing everyone that works here is smart and you'll learn something from everybody that's that's happened to me at a few jobs uh and and i've also seen it um at a company i worked at a few years ago the team was really smart and really young and and everyone was kind of like getting started in their careers and as the team and the company grew that team became known as like a really smart really capable team and and it helped us a lot with attracting people to interview there and and and it just kind of sustained itself so how do you signal to the world that you have a team like that um that's a great question that's here's an idea find the

smartest person you know interview them and then reject them and then tell everybody about it they couldn't hack it imagine the people that could i mean some of it some of this is standard engineering marketing stuff like having a tech blog contributing to open source supporting people that speak at conferences stuff like that that's all the very visible side of engineering i don't know how you make it known about the the brilliant people that just don't care about any of that crap who um honestly in my experience seem to outnumber the brilliant people that do do all that crap oh yeah so i i don't know the complete answer but some of it is just kind of putting a little effort into spreading that word and then let word of mouth marketing take it from

there yeah well a tech blog is a big one if if you have people that enjoy writing and are smart let them write and help them do it on company time yeah i i have incredibly positive impressions of lots of companies i know nothing about personally just because of their tech blogs so yeah so let's go back to the interview process a little bit i think that as a interviewer it's really important that you are willing to say out loud to the candidate we try hard to make this a great place to work because if you don't say it how are how else are they going to know it and yeah um i think saying that out loud helps to reinforce also to your own mind that this is a priority for you and it also is something you need to be saying to management you know we need to

make this a great place to work and get management bought into the idea that they will have a better company and a better product if you can hire good engineers and to do so that means you need their support in making it a great place yeah i mean if you're already interviewing them to some extent you have attracted talent already yeah it's true so how do you make them know that before the interview process well that's the word of mouth stuff right oh that's where you find the smartest person in the world and reject them yeah like me that's clearly that's the only reason i've ever been rejected from a job interview is to help build their street cred oh man the market is so competitive for engine to hire engineers right now

that it can feel frustrating and like you don't have much to differentiate yourself there's always someone that will pay more than what your company can offer there's always someone with more i don't know a product that more people have heard of or there's just a lot out there but there there is there's got to be something about the place you work that you can offer that other people can't if you're a brand new company or a small company you can offer promotions or responsibilities that people might not get at other companies or there's just something there's something you have that's different from everyone else even though you feel like at everything your company has there is another company that's better at that exact thing right there's some combination of attributes about

your company that you can offer that other people can't so if you can identify that you can use that to try and sell people on i totally agree and i think you need to practice that messaging and you know sometimes you hear people use the term narrative like come up with the narrative that is both true and really compelling to engineers and try them out as you're meeting new candidates who may want to join your company. Use that narrative and see what resonates with them. At every company I've worked at, I've done this,

I think subconsciously actually, because I'm mostly trying to find purpose for my own self, really. And if you find something that gives you purpose and meaning in the work you do, then it's likely that it will resonate with other engineers. Figure out how to tell that story. Figure out how your company is doing something good for other people. that's the make the world a better place yeah speech right yep try not to be too sappy yeah

actually i don't know i actually do get pretty sappy when i tell these stories and do you i'm a little cynical about but to make how my company that builds uh i don't know a microsecond ads auction market makes the world a better place or whatever there's a lot of companies that make money a better money i don't know it's true but and maybe there are people who are into that but uh like i think the reason i can get away with that is because i actually am kind of a sappy person i don't know if you notice this about me but i kind of am and so when i tell the story i think people are like wow this guy really believes this stuff yeah because i do like i wouldn't say it if i didn't and and it's what sustains me so sure i i i have definitely worked at some jobs

that did not have or either did not have or i did not believe in the mission but there were other things that attracted me there um this kind of gets to another point though you you mentioned earlier about how did you mention this did you already talk about how it's hard to be all things to all people i did not but that now is a great time that was well that was a good segue yeah it was take it away dave so i i think it's impossible to be all things to everyone oh really yeah there you go i said it um which means that there are going to be qualified candidates who are not interested in your company and you have to come to terms with that and and just accept that without getting discouraged when they say no. Um, because you want to find

people who align well with your culture and your mission and, uh, and your company's values. And that's not just not going to be everyone, you know? Um, but when you do find people who align well, I think it turns out way, way good. Yeah. The other thing you need to do, I think when you're interviewing people, especially is figure out what they are looking for. And sometimes you can just ask this question point blank and some people will have answers but a surprising number of engineers don't really know like they're like i don't know what do you have to offer you know like they haven't really thought of it and they haven't really thought of it in those concrete in that concrete of terms yeah so once you figure that out though you can really uh tune your

message to resonate with them with their specific needs i i do want to go back to the being all things to all people point because i think it can be really scary at first when you think there's this pool this set of all available engineers and if we if we do some things that some people in that set will dislike we are limiting the set of people that we could ever have work here so it feels like it's it could be a negative thing oh yeah but i think it's so much easier to attract people if you have a strong identity and that means there you pick some things that you really are against and some things that you're really for and it's way easier to match up with those people that that agree with that than it is to stick out in just like the broad sea of companies

that do computering yeah that's kind of like kind of like our our episode on specialist versus generalist right like the great paradox is that the more you specialize the easier it is to find the people who need your services yeah right even though like the set is smaller yeah like like etsy they have a monolithic php app which some people have already puked in their mouths but but they just do all this awesome stuff around monitoring and operations and they're kind of famous for that technically so they they attract a certain type of engineer engineers either like php or aren't kind of like snobby about php and people that are excited about monitoring and continuous delivery and so by by identifying some things and being really strong about them and this is all pure

technical stuff too right then that that that gets them cred i don't know that makes it easier for them to attract certain kinds of people yeah absolutely and that's like a super specific example and there's more broad things you can also identify about your company as well like are you a super demanding company or are you a laid back company? And either way, you're going to filter out a big chunk of the population. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, do you inspire, do you like competition? Do you depend more on collaboration? Do you do remote? Do you expect everyone to be in the office and you have kind of defined thoughts about why that's better or yeah, there's a, there's a lot of ways to create a culture and then kind of enforce that.

yeah definitely and and you don't really have to pin yourself down to one of those necessarily but you probably will anyway eventually like companies just kind of evolve this way and yeah i think it's really important to identify what your culture is in those regards yeah so you don't miss sell yourself yeah well so you don't miss sell yourself but even so you can sell yourself you might have to go do some sociology i don't know anthropology is that what it would be to go examine what it's actually like and then you can just emphasize stuff that's already there that to you might just seem like part of the air it's just how the world works but to people outside it might be something really unique and different that's called

anthro-culturology oh okay just so you know cool so uh did we already talk about how good teams are self-sustaining yes that one we actually did a little bit okay but so should we talk more Yeah, a little bit. So I think that there are people in the industry who you sometimes notice other people will follow them around from job to job. And you'll see this trend happening. And I first noticed this right out of college when I went to work with this small company that had about a dozen people. and the i heard these people talk like over lunch and at the water cooler as if they had been lifelong friends and i realized like over the course of the next few months it's because they have been like they had worked together they had worked together at like five companies over 25 years and you know they had some a few years apart and then back together you know and it was like they had i think they had like one or two ringleaders where wherever they went the rest

of the guys would follow right yeah and i say guys because this happened to be a cohort of men so um if you can find people like that who have both a good reputation for being a good engineer and who other engineers like to follow it can be a real gold mine for attracting talent yep i've seen that exact same thing happen some of it is explicit where people are like this person left and went to this job i want to leave and go to this job too and some of it is just a little more slow and diffuse where they just kind of reach their tentacles out and and bring people in but yeah i've definitely seen that also um from another story from my own experience is that sometimes you'll hit all the right points and you'll think you've got an

engineer who's going to come work with you and then they'll express a concern they'll just say no at the like the final moment they'll be like nope i'm not going to come and to me like this is the final well it is the final chance you have to attract that engineer and and convince them that they should join your company now by the way i would never advocate for convincing someone to join your company if you actually believe it's not the best thing for them that's probably an important point we should have made first which is don't try to attract people who you don't think it's in their best interest to work with you sure but what about that sweet sweet referral bonus oh man oh i've got stories about that too anyway a different question at the last moment i've had

engineers say, no, I'm not going to accept your offer. And that's where it becomes important to figure out what it is exactly that is concerning them. And sometimes you'll be lucky and you'll realize that the thing that's concerning them is actually something that's not valid, or it's maybe a mistaken impression that they got, and you can talk through it with them. But you really need to be willing to talk specifically about engineers' needs if you want them to go all the way through the process and accept your offer yeah and sometimes engineers like myself shy away from these topics because it's like taboo or something like you know it's almost like the money talk you sometimes don't want to have right yeah but you need to so there there are definitely times where

people might say no and not tell you why and if you knew why you'd be able to solve that problem for them basically yeah exactly with the power of words with the magic of words i thought it would be with the magic of powerpoint slides that you had prepared with but they would have words on them of course so i guess it's the same thing it's just another medium for the words i think our industry has a large problem with diversity where it's hard for people that don't look like a lot of the other people that work in the industry already to break in and to get jobs and to get promoted and so i actually think if you how is a gigantic question mark to me that i don't understand fully but i think if you can create a culture that is attractive to to diverse

people that feels like a gigantic competitive advantage because yeah they're out there and and they're very aware of of what it's like at all these different companies and how friendly and welcoming they are and um like like slack is one example of a company that does an amazing job of hiring diverse engineers and i see people talk about it all the time it attracts people to work there so if you can figure that out and make it friendly and welcoming i think that's a gigantic advantage that um honestly lots of companies do not have and never will have you mean like they don't they just don't even have access to large swaths of the marketplace yeah there's there's large populations that have heard bad things about them or feel unwelcome or feel like they don't

have a chance to succeed or want to work there but just can't get in the door because of hiring practices or cultural things or just networks of everyone that works there is a white male and most of those people know white males so those are who they refer and things like that so just some of it could just be inertia like that too really good point but yeah there's there's a gigantic largely untapped population out there i feel like and i've seen that in action as well okay so the last thing i want to say about this topic is you usually have to be willing to pay top dollar to attract top talent and um you know not every engineer is going to demand like these this amazingly huge salary but but the good engineers will generally demand a good salary competitive you know a little

bit above market at least salary has that been your experience jameson i'm trying to think yeah i mean it sounds good it certainly would not hurt i like i like money yeah yeah money seems fine i don't think it would hurt there are companies that have reputations for paying really well and that attracts people it might this might be another way you can differentiate your company where it's a thing that some people will be really excited about and i don't i don't know that people would be like they pay a lot of money that's garbage but like there will be some subset of so it won't drive people away but there will be some subset of engineers that'll be more excited about that this is also a bit of a tricky balance because it's really easy to do

wrong yeah if uh if you offer too high of salaries you will attract a segment of the population that is looking for a quick pay bump and as soon as your company is no longer the highest paying company they'll be off to the next one you know so you have to balance that against um that phenomenon yeah it's also hard just because if your business doesn't have enormous piles of cash like that money has to come from somewhere so so businesses have incentives to keep salaries as low as they can and get away with you just need to mow lawns and make up the difference yeah if you want to attract the best talent it's just the sacrifices you must make i i think in my mind money is another facet of that same set of perks that we talked about

earlier and that you you can do it without being a good place to work i guess maybe not though maybe you wouldn't maybe if you're not a good place to work you wouldn't have the money to throw around in high salaries i think you could it's like you have some kind of experience about that well i've heard stories about people who work for a certain sector of the financial industry um that have these astronomical developer salaries but they also are just terrible um places to work like just super demoralizing tons of hours really aggressive and stressful but they pay really well yeah they pay incredibly well like i've heard 500k as a like a fine salary for a super talented quant wow it's it's really interesting though i feel like like

sometimes in places i hang out online they're i don't know like comment threads or whatever and you can just see when those people get into it they just have like a different way of looking at the world and talking about things and different values so i i think people that work there often are people that want to work there where they they're workaholics and they want to work crazy hours and there are some insane technical problems they deal with that would never ever occur at a place that like builds a shopping cart or and they're they're highly financially motivated so that's where they go well there you go so last thing i want to say about compensation this is i think the last thing i said was actually the second to last thing this is the actual last

thing okay which is you you need to be prepared to verbalize to people uh all the components of your compensation and this can include the benefits that you offer whether it's like a retirement benefit or health insurance it can include of course your salary any bonus system that's in place, any kind of equity comp time off, uh, flexible office hours, things like that. You need to be prepared to explain those things. And I think that, uh, that kind of stuff can be really attractive. And a lot of people have a hard time talking through it because it's not code, you know? Yeah. That's, that's the thing. My last employer did really well. They have amazing benefits. They're so good. And some people don't know the value of them. Some,

and some people don't know that they offer them so yeah cool question answered question answered excellent you're welcome dear listener dear listener hello friend it's sponsor time again our sponsor is dev mountain which is a coding boot camp with campuses in salt lake city and provo utah they offer free housing for the full-time students the full-time program is 12 weeks long and they do ui ux web development and ios they also have part-time classes if you don't have the the schedule flexibility to just take three months off of life um we're gonna go back and talk a little bit more to barbara leo who we've met the past couple weeks we talked to her a little bit about things that were surprising to her about the development community and just

kind of software culture in general actually you know what that is something that surprised me was how twitter crazy all developers are like i mean i try to go on there and i've had a twitter for a while but i never posted anything until i became a developer and i was like oh my gosh i am on this all the time even if i'm just like lurking like i don't even really post but i get all my news from there someone today was like oh did this come out i'm like oh yeah and they're like how do you know that i'm like oh twitter like that's how does anyone know anything in the developing world yeah twitter yeah if you are interested in picking up new skills or refreshing old skills check out dev mountain you can go to devmountain.com if you actually go to softskills.audio

slash dev mountain then it'll redirect you to their website and then we can prove to them that we directed traffic to them so that'll help us out too so check dev mountain out back to the show all right jameson would you read our next question i will read our next question this is from an anonymous listener a spooky ghost i just i don't know it's not anymore yeah but i i don't know in my head anonymous listeners are all ghosts anonymous i have interned at a company for six semesters and i'm about to graduate and have landed my dream job what's the best way to turn down the company i've been working at without burning any bridges six semesters that's a long internship yeah that's it's a long time some people don't even go to school for six semesters

that is true we were not laughing at you college dropouts you're probably all super rich and living and listening from your yacht one of them is among us right now i went to school for more than six semesters though wait isn't it like only eight semesters to graduate with a bachelor's yeah some hardcore people can do it in faster though so you you were just barely above six semesters no way above some of us also changed their minds about what they wanted to study a lot too and had a brief foray into pre-med oh oh which was actually not brief and several semesters long oh my so and some of us then changed their mind again oh well you're really Maybe you should have majored in mind-changing.

Maybe I did. Okay. All right. So how do you quit that internship? So I'm assuming this is this listener's first job. Well, probably. Because just from the way they've talked about it. And for me, quitting my first job was pretty hard and nerve-wracking.

Me too. I worked on campus for a while, and those jobs were easy to quit because they were all staffed by students, and the expectation is it's pretty transient. But the first job I quit, I felt this deep personal responsibility to the company. And that they would be, I thought that they were going to be mad at me, like pissed off that I was quitting. Me too. And I quit and they weren't mad. They were like, well, we want you to still work here, but you don't. Well, I was pretty mad at you.

Yeah. I remember thinking you quit that job and I was enraged. You've forgiven me eventually. I didn't even know you, but I was just so mad. You felt a disturbance. No, I had the same sense. Like it was like I was stabbing them in the back. It was like, yeah.

betraying them letting them down yep and i was worried they would be mad yeah they weren't they they weren't in my case either it was totally fine turns out that uh let me tell you what it feels like on the other side of the desk when someone comes in and quits i have never i've had that happen to me i think four times and in every case my thoughts immediately turn to myself not this backstabbing little intern you know whippersnapper it was all about what did i not do to retain this this engineer oh i thought you meant myself like wow they're quitting like maybe maybe i should let's get off the sinking ship yeah no that that thought well actually yeah that thought across my mind too but but again it's not it's not about the person quitting

it's about me like oh what did i do to mess this up oh yeah you know and even that's not that long usually they tell their story and i'm like oh yeah that is a great opportunity well good luck that sounds great yeah i've had let's see i think only two people quit on teams that i was kind of in charge of and in both cases it was like i don't know there's there's nothing i can do it it really does sound like it's better for them where they're going they have credible reasons and i tried to convince them to stay like well have you thought about this and holding up a giant bag with a dollar sign on it or whatever and they're like yep the bag they're giving me at this other place is way bigger than that and then i was like okay sounds great for you i think that um so even though

we just said that they probably won't take it personally and they probably won't be mad um it can help you to get out of the awkward conversation not avoid it but to get through it by coming up with a good narrative there's that word again narrative yeah where you describe why this is an opportunity for you that you think you just can't turn down and my favorite phrase is this opportunity just came to me and i just feel like i can't pass it up you know and suddenly it's all about the other opportunity not about how crappy this job is yeah yeah i actually i worked for several years with a developer who is amazing and everyone loved them and they did great work just incredibly talented and they quit to go move out west and join this large text

well not i don't know are they still a startup i don't know one of the gigantic mega tech companies and i wasn't their manager or anything i was just a peer and the the their boss tried so hard to convinced them to stay pulled every trick and it just didn't work because they had decided and then it was kind of like a graduation party instead of like everyone being mad at them where everyone was just like that's awesome this is that's that's so cool that you're going to work there and you're going to do all this awesome stuff like we're sad to see you go but man that's amazing exactly like they'll probably be happy for you yeah yeah we we were definitely happy for them even though we were sad that we weren't going to work together anymore as you're describing the situation to your boss

try to use i phrases where you're like i felt like i couldn't pass this up i was excited about this opportunity and and try to avoid phrases like you like well you just aren't where i want to go you aren't the company i want to work for um and you have terrible management skills you know like let's not say those things and even if you're tempted to unload some of your criticisms of the company which after six semesters you undoubtedly have observed some negative things about this company yeah this is not the time for that yeah yeah i remember that when i quit my first job uh my first off-campus job i i had some dirt i was itching to get some stuff off my chest and my dad sat me down and was like do not say any of it it's not gonna help you're quitting they're

not gonna like you've already left their tribe so your word doesn't hold that much weight with them yep and all you can do is just make them mad yes no good can come to you if you do that now i don't know if that's like a universal truth because i feel like there's there's got to be ways to give negative feedback to companies but if if you're quitting and they have no idea about how you feel about some of the broken stuff like something else went wrong i guess like your manager should probably be aware of the things there that you don't like if if it's like you're quitting because there are things that you don't like if it's just i don't know google gave you a bajillion dollars and you're really pumped about that then yeah i'll say i don't know but but if there are things

you dislike i i don't know that the exit and i agree with you dave i don't know the the exit interview is a great place to rant with them all and that's it i think i think you'll do fine yeah sounds sounds like an awesome dream job yeah it sounds like a dream job honestly sounds literally like a dream job yeah and uh yeah don't be nervous question answered question answered we did it jameson where can people go if they want to support the soft skills engineering podcast they can do that in a couple ways they can tweet about the show they can go to soft skills dot audio and check out past episodes they can also go to softskills.audio slash devmountain and they'll get sent over to the devmountain website we're so grateful to them for sponsoring

they bought my ferrari dave's giant thing and soon they're gonna buy me something even bigger to make up for what they stiffed me on so thanks devmountain thank you