Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 360: Mixing up names and improving without feedback

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: At work, I occasionally mix names of people in my team when I refer to them in meetings. My mother used to do this with my siblings when I was a child and I hated it. I guess I am getting older. Should I just accept the defeat? Any suggestions how to deal with this? How do I find areas to improve without critical feedback? I’ve had regular 1-on-1s with multiple people over the years (managers, mentors, tech leads), and asked for feedback regularly. Yet, most, if not all of the feedback I received was positive. Even when I stress that I want to receive critical feedback as well, the other person tells me that they do give such feedback to other devs, they just don’t have anything to criticize! This sounds like a humble brag, but I’m concerned that I will stop growing and improving if this goes on. I’m also a bit worried that deep down, the managers/leads just keep quiet to keep me happy - either because we have a friendly relationship, or because I’m one of the only women on the team (not trying to accuse them of sexism, but lets be real - “locker room talks” are held back when I’m around, and it might cause some people to be less frank to avoid possible “‘drama”). Due to the lack of direction, I’m trying to look at my senior colleagues and what they do better than me - do they have more technical knowledge, do they communicate better, etc. - but it’s often hard to apply to myself due to specializing in different areas, having different personalities and so on.

it takes more than remembering you have a meeting in three minutes looking back at your code and then showing up five minutes late to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 360 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who enter time vortices every time they open their editor you know we talk about time travel a lot as the solution to problems on this show and this is a form of time travel it just only goes forward it's a fast forward button on your time yeah do you remember that story it was kind of like a chicken noodle soup for the soul style like tale about morality where there was somebody who had some magic thing that let them skip time and they

used it whenever stuff got boring or unpleasant okay no but go on i think it was like a ball of yarn they'd like pull some string and skip ahead so they used it to like skip a test or skip an uncomfortable conversation or skip like yeah an awkward interaction with a date or whatever and they kind of went through their life and then got to the end they were sad and alone because they missed all those meaningful moments i thought you were gonna say they pulled the last piece of yarn out and then just died maybe they did too i don't remember that part i think it's so so it's a warning about the dangers of forward time travel are they saying that the boredom is actually the good parts i think so it's like crap but it's good for your character uh all right i i do this

as a manager still too it's just with emails or documents quick i'll just tweak this thing and then you look up and oh no oh no five minutes late to my one-on-one with my boss classic yeah yes all right well it's sometimes they are too it's episode 360 that means it's time to do a 360 degree review just so happens we have feedback from a listener perfect timing we will share it with you hey i asked the second question in episode oh to be clear this is me reading i didn't just start saying hey i asked the second question in episode 337 where i loved my team and hated my manager. I have an update. I listened to your advice. So this was about someone who loved their team and hated their manager, had some struggles and problems with

this manager. I listened to your advice, talked to my teammate, talked to my manager, and I thought I worked it out. I started improving in my and my teammates' minds. However, my manager became very micromanaging. He was belittling me. He asked my teammates questions about my pull requests instead of me and did a lot of other BS. He also told me to stop being so emotional during a meeting when i was crying at his treatment of me ouch he put me on a pip i quit two weeks into it after he was upset that i was both over and underestimating tickets i'm leaving out a lot of detail but it gets worse the more that i share i'm really sorry that sounds awful but wait here's here's the good part i didn't just pick this to share someone's misery okay your advice was super

helpful to me i listened to it many times as i was going through this experience i want to add for anyone who is listening that quitting your job is not giving up i thought that it was and that is why i kept pushing through but i started to have panic attacks at work i could not relax and was constantly on edge if you've tried to work with someone and it only gets worse and your mental health is deteriorating quit i instantly felt more free and lighter once i resigned you deserve to work at a place that makes you better luckily i found a job within two months of quitting i'm in my second week at a company that has so far been amazing i'm learning and i'm so totally outside my comfort zone in the best way oh the quit your job advice is back yeah we've got

testimonials now i thought we had dialed that down but i'm just gonna dial it up to 11 now yep knee-jerk reactions to small numbers of feedback name of the game n equals one double down yes i i'm really sorry that you had a such an awful experience leaving that company yeah can be really painful to get to get pushed out yeah uh something some situations you can't fix you know that's a good point about uh yeah i i could feel that sometimes too that it's it's my fault that things are bad here and and it's i i'm failing if i just work hard enough i can fix this yeah you're like a plant that got planted in a pile of gravel like why am i not growing yeah what's wrong my roots are maybe i just have to try harder yeah push my roots around

a little harder yeah no you need to end up in delicious manure soil with worms and all kinds of other good plant stuff there's a sweet pile of manure waiting for you out there yes yep dream big i'm i'm glad it worked out thank you for giving an update on how it worked out as well thank you And I told Dave I don't remember what our advice was, but I'm glad you listened to it. I'll have to go back and remind myself to see if I'm horrified at that thought or not. This show means nothing to Jameson. He's just phoning it in. No, I just have no short-term memory.

Or even medium-term. I mean, this was like, how long ago was this? Like 20 weeks ago? Well, it's got to start in your short-term memory, I think. That's a good point. It doesn't even get through that. Yeah. Well, congrats.

I'm really glad. I prefer to think of it as living in the moment. not having brain damage. Jameson is fully present because that's all he has, is the present. The past is a mystery.

Do you want to thank our patrons? I do. I want to thank our patrons. We have a one-time shout-out for Dance Smith and Jameson Dave. Thank you. And we have weekly shout-outs for Trash Panda, thecomputersciencebook.com, the re-elect jameson dance boogie brigade and the re-elect jameson dance committee wow santa hope r noah frazier lowe kent c dodds jenny kim owen chartle benjamin earl if you would

like to join this illustrious crew go up to soft skills.audio and click the support us on patreon button that was the actual name because i'm not done reading the names yet greg motley i love mavis the stochastic parrot alice just tuscawaras ohio good grief patreon.com.au we're hiring ira chan monkey face emoji jonathan king web tau awesome end-to-end testing oladapofadi the re-elect jameson dance committee nick hathaway travis sanders brayden canes john grant cody please hire jameson sale nick cantar philip john vasile i feel like there's a conspiracy i hadn't read these out i hadn't read these out loud until just now oh this is one the soft skills engineering community

is just what a wonderful group of people oh my goodness i agree oh love you all okay if you'd like to join this illustrious crew for real go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button any amount you donate will get you access to our slack community where you can conspire against jameson as well or in his favor yes and if you contribute enough we will say your name or whatever you can write in the in the patreon name field every week on this show thank you so much this is heartwarming i think conspiring in my favor actually makes me more uncomfortable than conspiring against me you'd rather have an army of enemies for yeah thank you i i appreciate the financial support for the show and also what i will interpret as nice messages for me i'll thank

Yeah, well, good job. All right, you want to read our first question? I do. This is from an anonymous listener who says, at work, I occasionally mix names of people in my team when I refer to them in meetings. My mother used to do this with my siblings when I was a child, and I hated it.

Oh, no. I guess I'm getting older. Should I just accept the defeat? Any suggestions how to deal with this? Oh, no. This is me. Oh, man. Just last night, I called one of my kids

by one of their other kids' names, and they kind of they don't like that how often does this happen to you as a parent to me as a parent yeah how often do you call your kids by other kids names oh most days and if i have recently interacted with my siblings i call my kids my siblings names yeah i do it all the time too and i think it's pretty common among parents i know my parents did it all the time and i hated it as a kid as well like don't you know who i am yeah but do you not even love me sometimes i have to make it through every member of my immediate family before i arrive on the right name me too i'm pretty good about my wife's name i don't think i i often call her by the wrong name but

i'm sure i have sometimes yeah same here although definitely the kids if you call your spouse by your child's name though that is really over the line that's really bad oh i gotta go have a big fight with my wife then because it happens all the time do you see me as a child i see it as a marker of just how tired we are it's so true oh boy i had i had a couple of co-workers whose names i mixed up regularly or okay it was just so it wasn't that i had a problem with everyone on the team it was just two individuals whose names got imprinted into my brain the wrong way and it took it took it took concerted effort to unimprint them and then imprint them right but i found that sitting down with people and having kind of one-on-one time with them

individually just spend some extra time with them to let to just let their their whole persona just kind of imprint on your soul it helps me form kind of a new i don't know i'm going to say some things that are probably only applicable in space psychiatry but okay let's go for it but i have this mental model the damaging magnetosphere of the earth really gets in the way of the inferences made by this model exactly exactly so yeah i have this mental model of how the brain works which is interesting because the brain itself has created this mental model about how it works because it has no idea about how it works. And I have this idea of how names are coupled with these bigger feelings or identities that aren't just simple words or descriptions. So it's like when I spend

a lot of time with someone, I will never forget their name. And when I think of their name, I recall their whole being, things about them, their mannerisms, the stories, the experiences we had together. Those are all kind of bundled into one big unit and their name is just part of it and it sticks and it stays with me forever. But for people for whom that body, that corpus of memory is small, and I don't mean small in time that you spent with them, just small in terms of experiences collected and memories formed, the name disappears for me. And I actually hate this about myself because when I think back on jobs that I had for years, I can't remember the names of half the people I worked with, but I can clearly remember the names of people that I,

for example, shared an office with or worked very closely with. Never forget them. But then there's 50 other people at that place that I talked to almost every day, but just didn't form that strong corpus of imprinted memory and experience with, and their names just disappear. So that was my long-winded space psychologist way of saying, spend more time with the people whose names you can't remember. Yeah. I've learned from fantasy books that names hold great power. And if you know someone's true name, you can cast evil magics on them. So maybe the people whose names you can't remember are just powerful defensive sorceresses or whatever, you know.

Yes. And it's actually them blocking you. Yes. so you need to go to them and say teach me your ways teach me your yes teach me your ways how do you obfuscate your name like this yes there's a couple different ways i've i mix up names sometimes i just say the wrong words and that happens with names but also concepts in general yeah yeah and and sometimes i notice it and correct it and sometimes i just have no idea Yeah. And then other people correct it. And that's scarier to me. It is. I wonder, I can't know how

often that happens by default. I can notice when I say a thing and I figure out later I said the wrong thing and go back. But how many times do I just blow past it and don't say anything or don't figure it out? Do you have this experience where you say the wrong word and then like two or three words later, your mind tells you, you said the wrong word. And then when that happens to me, I kind of get panicky because I'm like, whoa, how many did my mind miss? You know, if I caught that one, there were surely others. Yeah. Well, for me, it's like, maybe I said the wrong word. And then I have to ask the person and they always say, yes, you said the wrong word. I don't even know for sure I said the wrong thing. If you even have an inkling that you said the wrong thing,

you did. Yeah. I'm trying to spin this into a clever solution of what you do. I worked with a couple of folks who had names that were pretty similar and i mixed them up a lot and for the it wasn't a so i have this problem in general but with this specific case where there are two names that i mixed up because they were very similar and they they did similar types of work even i just became very ashamed and embarrassed so that every time i said either one of their names i my brain added this extra validation step of like say the name okay now stop and think did you say the right name which is hard to scale but i think i got better at it i just like you could see my brain pause to do garbage collection while you were talking with me if i ever brought up these

people it's error correction codes why did jameson just sit there for like five seconds that was weird stare blankly at the screen yeah so let that let that shame power you yes my suggestion if it's for very specific people. Tap into the shame. I wonder how it appears to the folks whose names you are mixing up. Do they know that you know their names and that your brain is on the fritz?

Or do they think, actually, this person doesn't know who I am? Yeah, that's a good question. Because I feel like those, you would react differently to them. One of them, if you know this is just like a weird thing their brain does,

then maybe you're a little bit more patient. This is why I think you need to spend more time with them and make sure you say their name a lot during that time so there's no question listen i know your name also a benefit of remote work their names right there on the zoom or in slack exactly that is very handy always look at it and it's very handy i actually have found that helpful when starting a job and getting to know people is it's it's so much easier to just look at the screen and say oh yeah this person instead of trying to remember wait someone else told me their name and which is why in my new remote hybrid environment where we come in person

sometimes i make everyone wear name tags yeah and the font is the same as the zoom font yeah it's actually a frame around their head that they have to wear that's right in the lower right corner it says their name yeah but only if you hover it like your hand over it so you have to hold your hand up next to their face exactly hold still hold still i'm trying to let them see your name yeah hang on i'm trying to hide the fact that i can't remember your name hold still i stick my hand next to your face next to that there's a pin button so you can pin them so they always stand in front of you they're pinned in real life like two two metal rods extend from you and trap their frame yep sounds like the innovation we need to make hybrid work even better yeah we've always

been trying to make remote work feel like in person why don't we do the opposite yes yes all right that's all i got i think if you can show them that you know who they are enough and also acknowledge that you have this problem and tell them hey like yell at me or let me know when i do this maybe that helps yeah a little pre-apology and then a guidance on how to behave when they see it yeah one one thing i've seen is if i've worked with other people who do this sometimes i can figure out what they mean when they say the wrong name but sometimes i can't and then i have to it's like i have to interrupt them and say hey did you mean this person so then maybe that's part of the pre-apology is like i want to be clear and when i'm when i'm talking about stuff and make sure

i'm clearly understood and so if you are confused about who i'm talking about yeah make sure to nudge me so i can be clear yeah the worst case scenario is that they don't think they're confused and they yeah that's true how do you how do you notice that you said the wrong thing and it has disastrous consequences well i guess you'll have to ask a separate follow-up question to hear what to do about that we can't be given all given too many of our secrets away you've used all your tokens for this question time to move on to the next one yes all right good luck i share your same okay my turn shall i read the next question yes please here we go how do i find areas to improve without critical feedback. I've had regular one-on-ones with multiple people over

the years, like managers, mentors, and tech leads, and asked for feedback regularly. Yet most, if not all of the feedback I received, was positive. Even when I stress that I want to receive critical feedback as well, the other person tells me that they do give such feedback to other developers, they just don't have anything to criticize in me. This sounds like a humble brag, but I'm concerned that i will stop growing and improving if this goes on i'm also a bit worried that deep down the managers and leads just keep quiet to keep me happy either because we have a friendly relationship or because i'm one of the only women on the team not trying to accuse them of sexism but let's be real locker room talks are held back when i'm around and it might cause some people

to be less frank and to avoid possible quote drama due to the lack of direction i'm trying to look at my senior colleagues and what they do better than me do they have more technical knowledge do they communicate better etc but it's often hard to apply to myself due to specializing in different areas having different personalities and so on you're just so great there's nothing there's no feedback to give you're incredible you've transcended or ascended i don't know this is tricky yeah feedback is is so hard giving feedback is hard receiving it is hard soliciting it is hard it's really easy to not i think the default is to just not do any of that and then let stuff go on for too long and then have some terrible disaster happen because feedback was not delivered or

received early enough it's just a tricky problem in general i have some generic advice which is there's a book called thanks for the feedback that i have read and enjoyed greatly and it is specifically about who wrote that one jameson i forgot i don't remember but it's thanks to the magic of the internet i'll be able to pretend like i remember the whole time i think amazon wrote it just kidding that's where google says i think a penguin wrote it it looks like it was written by a penguin i see a little penguin logo on it okay it's not gliss stone and she like okay sorry it's not someone we had recognized i thought i thought it was somebody that we had talked about before anyway oh i don't know we've talked about the book before sorry for the

interruption i have feedback for myself don't interrupt jameson so much okay back to you okay thank you it's a good book it's long and i am unable to summarize the book coherently to remove the need for you to read it so that's one piece of advice check that book out it's it's good and has sections on how to solicit feedback and among other things we're going to make up our own advice here and and if any of it contradicts what's in the book then the book supersedes us love more yeah it's like that that that test in those kids movies with an animal where there's two there's like the two people and they put the animal in the middle and see who it goes to i don't know that that test is that a trope or is that just a scene from a single movie

i don't know i remember there's a movie about a monkey that is a thief that they train to steal jewelry i think okay and someone steals the monkey and uses it to steal jewelry and then the original owner comes back and they have this dramatic scene in a park where they're like trying to prove who the monkey loves or who the owner owns it or something yeah but actually the the the person who stole the monkey is cheating and they put food in their hand ah and i'll let you figure out how that relates okay good because i was about to ask okay carry on just a little tidbit for you okay yeah i i think in the absence of i'm gonna skip over what to do to collect more feedback okay from your your boss for now and point to two things one is external mentors this is a

different kind of feedback relationship they might not be people you work with directly so they might not have direct observations about what you do as as clearly as your boss but they also don't have the same incentives around maintaining a working relationship or avoiding i don't know upsetting you or things like that like hopefully that lets them be a little bit more blunt and honest about what they see and suggestions to improve because they're not worried about like kind of backlash this might cause on the team or something like that. And obviously, you want someone who is kind and well-meaning and well-intentioned. But that's my first suggestion is find someone who can be a kind of an external coach.

It can be at the same company, but maybe a different team or different part of the org. Could be someone outside of the company, just in your network, a friend or colleague that you talk to about work and ask for advice. But that's one way of receiving feedback that's a bit more of an outsider's perspective. I mean, one of the trade-offs is if your boss has stuff they're frustrated you're not doing, then this external mentor might not know that. Yeah, they wouldn't. Because they're not in your boss's head.

That's a downside. But I think it's a really good idea, though, to bring in an external person to help mentor you. They will tell you things that your co-workers have strong incentives not to tell you, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. But the other piece of advice is you've kind of touched on it, but it's sort of on you more to collect, to turn observations into feedback and more introspection and pulling feedback out of good examples you see around you. So this might not be feedback in terms of someone saying you are doing this thing wrong and need to do it differently, but more like I saw this person do something awesome. How do I do more of that thing? Yes, exactly.

And can I just say that in my career, the best feedback I've ever received did not come from people. It came from observing the outcomes of my own choices and then going, oh, that was dumb or, oh, there's a better way to do this or, oh, I can see how this wasn't effective. If you're looking for kind of this almost like a little instruction book where someone says, say this, do that, here's how you can be better, you're just not going to find it because we're all these imperfect people just kind of stumbling through this professional life

trying to figure out how the heck to do things. And no one has the answers. So, I mean, some people have some answers. I don't want to bag on feedback entirely, but I think a lot of us, myself included for many years, I think I put too much value on hearing what other people have to tell me about how I can do better. Hmm, that's a wise quote, Dave.

I reject your feedback. thinking about that oh i'm sorry i'm just gonna keep cramming it down your throat one more thing we've talked about a fair amount on the podcast but i will keep repeating is the more specific you make your requests for feedback the easier it is for other people to give yes if you show up in a one-on-one and say do you have any feedback for me the the default answer is no because especially if it's are you looking for critical feedback People are unlikely to just have prepped an uncomfortable piece of criticism that might be, yeah, I've been waiting, and here it is. But if you notice something that you did that you feel like, I don't know, didn't come off as well as you want or could have gone better, if you ask very specific questions about that, it's much easier to get folks' opinions and thoughts on them.

I love that so much. Honestly, I wish we would just ban the phrase, do you have any feedback for me? You're just giving someone an opportunity to say no. And like you said, Jameson, when people have complaints or concerns about the way you're working, it actually takes effort on their part to turn that into something constructive you can deal with. And professional people who are respectful and kind, they would, like me, like this is my policy, they refuse to just dump negative feedback on you. like oh i just don't like that it's like no i'm going to take some time and think about this so now now i'm going to contradict myself earlier but the best feedback i've ever gotten from from a person no not from my own observations but not from you got it right from the mouth of

another human was someone who heard heard a few negative comments about me from multiple people and then thought about it synthesized it and then came to me and said dave listen i've heard some comments from some people about the way that you've done a few things. And I've thought about this and I've concluded what is causing this. And I'd like to share with you my perspective on that. And I was like, oh, thank you so much. It was wonderful. Because instead of just saying, so-and-so says they don't like you, it was like, here's what people are saying. Here's why I think they're saying it. And here are some ideas for how to improve. It was great. It actually was really, really helpful. So if you ask people for that, the chances that they're going to be ready

to deliver that kind of feedback on a spur-of-the-moment question, very, very low. Yeah. Yeah, that's a rare gift to receive feedback that's so carefully thought through and prepared. One time in 20 years, I've gotten feedback like that. Another thing you could try is, I agree with what you said, that professional, respectful people are probably inclined to be more careful about delivering it, which means holding back when they have some thoughts, but maybe they're not fully formed and they haven't figured out how to say it in a way that isn't hurtful or offensive or whatever. You can try to lower how much work someone else needs to put in to get feedback into a form that you will hear. Literally like a Google

form, right? Where you give them multiple choice options. Is that what you mean by form? not thinking that okay no that word is too overloaded a protocol how about that that's not overloaded shoot i like protocol let's go maybe a schema if if you make it really clear that you want to hear feedback of any level of refinement and say that enough times and then actually react positively when someone puts forth the effort to give you feedback even if it's nonsensical or you disagree or whatever i think that makes it easier for folks to receive feed to deliver feedback if if they don't have to put as much work in to refine it because they they the the stakes are lower if you say uh like i understand it might not be perfectly articulated

or or i don't know i don't want you to worry about hurting my feelings or offending me of course saying i promise not to be offended does not often make people feel like good this person will not be offended yeah you have to show them amount of a few times right yeah yeah and especially we haven't talked about the the gender dynamics here but yeah that's that's probably a factor i believe that's real for sure and and that could contribute to to the lack of feedback i agree and i will say that it's already it's already likely for everyone regardless of gender that they're going to not receive as much constructive feedback as they would like but this just takes that i think and makes it even more it compounds the problem i think yeah

just why maybe you can offset that a little bit at least by trying to make it clear that you you are a good feedback recipient you're not gonna get defensive or or react negatively to someone bringing you half-baked feedback yeah you can explore it and interrogate it and decide on your own if this feels useful to you and something that that should influence your behavior but but you want to kind of open up i'm missing an analogy in my brain right now you you want to make it easy easy to receive easy low cost for others to deliver to you i guess yeah i think that makes sense so i i'll add one more piece of advice on how to collect feedback but jamison you mentioned even though i totally poo-pooed the idea of even getting feedback

from other people but if you want it and i do think there's some value in it i don't want to say that it's totally valueless. But if you want it, I think that rather than asking people, hey, go to the effort of making feedback for me and delivering it. Rather than that, do these lightweight things. And I'll just give an example. Let's say you just delivered a design document and did a team review. You could sit down with people privately and say, hey, I felt like that went okay. I'm always looking for ways to improve. What would have been some ideas to improve the delivery of that? Was there anything that you saw that could have been a little better, either in the document or in the way that I brought it together. Like, hey, I did everything

in a real, you know, in-person meeting. Was that okay? I did it on our wiki instead of in a doc, a printed doc. Was that okay? You know, and just start kind of planting little very specific and very easy to respond to seeds with people so that those can turn into ideas that they then give back to you. And it kind of sets, it sets the stage for the, what's the word I'm looking for? Like magnitude of the feedback. It's like, look, I know it's hard for you to say to someone, I think you're a terrible public speaker. Like, fine, I'm not looking for that. I'm looking for little tips. In this case, at least, I'm looking for little tips. And then if you can show someone that you respond positively to these little things, then they'll see over time that you're

willing to respond to them well. And then over time, they might offer you stuff that they would have otherwise held back. But it starts with very specific questions. and without ever saying do you have any feedback for me yuck yeah we're not i don't think that's an offensive phrase but yeah the answer is no always yeah it's not offensive unless it's your boss and it's a performance review yeah then then the answer is probably yes but that's because they prepared it yeah they're like yeah that's why we're here dummy here's my feedback stop asking these obvious questions they put a 17 page document in front of you yeah this is i said it at the beginning i'll say it at the maybe this is the end i'll say it again

at least feedback is hard delivering feedback is hard soliciting it is hard receiving it well is hard and you can control how you solicit it and how you receive it you can't control how other people deliver it you can get better at how you deliver it though maybe that's another kind of side quest to think about is is yeah giving could i be more helpful in giving feedback to other people maybe there are other other folks who are kind of looking around and wondering how do i get better yeah it's unclear from from folks telling me what i am bad at um okay i have one last thought yeah there was a question that's baked into this one that is how do i grow as a developer professionally in the absence of feedback from others. And like, let's just assume that you're

not going to get it. Because like I said before, you're probably not. I mean, no one's going to tell you the little handbook for growing as a developer. So I have an idea on how to do that. One is make choices that put you into new situations that you haven't been in before. So for example, maybe you've been doing one kind of project with one particular technology stack for the last five years. Choose to put yourself into a new situation where you have to learn a whole new technology stack. This will cause your mind to be opened up

to new ways of doing things that will make you a better developer because you're now exposed to more ideas. And now you have more tools in your tool belt that you can apply to different problems. So that's one. Or maybe take on bigger scope projects. Maybe you've only done projects

that can be implemented by one or two developers. Next time there's an opportunity to handle a big project that crosses team boundaries, sign up for that. guaranteed you're going to learn because what's going to happen is you're putting yourself into a situation where you can make more mistakes mistakes that weren't even on the table for you to make before and now are and then that's those are all opportunities for learning because you'll make a mistake and then six months later you'll realize it was a mistake and you'll be like well i'm never doing that again like i'm like my professional life is just littered with these

technical mistakes that i've made over the last 20 years that i look back on and learn from and when people bring ideas to me, I'm like, I've seen that before. I know where that leads. It's not obvious for the first three months, but it'll be very obvious after the sixth month. And so I actually have that background now and I can actually rely on it. And maybe it means getting an audience with your executive team where it's like maybe someone needs a technical report on something and you have to present to an executive audience. So just look for things that are, look for opportunities that are outside of your normal day-to-day work and they will naturally create learning experiences for you that I think are even more valuable than just

asking someone to verbally describe to you how you can do better. Yeah, I like that. That also is kind of tied to what you said earlier about doing stuff and looking to see if it worked, if you achieve the outcome you wanted. And expanding your experiences helps give you more opportunities to do that. More failure opportunities. yeah this i mean it generally sounds like you're in a decent spot in that you are receiving positive feedback it seems like folks are are generally happy with the kind of work that you're doing and and while you're not receiving as as much or as high quality of constructive feedback as as you would prefer it sounds like you have some good things going on here so that's that's

positive i'd love to hear i would love you know what do you have any feedback question asker for us on on the feedback or suggestions we gave to you i'd love to hear did you just say do you have any feedback i thought we agreed on that phrase well it's like a trigger for me now yeah i guess i did all right strike that from the record please i'm trying to think of a more direct specific question was there anything here that you tried and worked out well that's that's one thing i want to know i know yeah success stories that we can shout to the world or things that sounded just horrible especially i don't know dave and i are both men we don't experience the same gender dynamics that that you might and and i'm sure we have blind spots here that we

we're just not even thinking of so that'd be useful for me to hear too is is there something you think that just will not work because of yeah gender stuff or other things yeah i'd love to hear more about how this goes i agree all right well question answered question question answered yeah we did it good job dave and thank you same to you my feedback is good job you know you put together a good podcast dave keep up the good work okay what can people do if they want their own questions answered Go to softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button. We thank you all for delivering such wonderful questions and content that just formed the backbone of this show.

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