Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 372: Equity and getting interrupted in Zoom meetings

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

This episode is sposored by OneSchema, the best way to build CSV import into your product. Check OneSchema out at https://oneschema.co/softskills In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I joined a startup at the peak of the tech bubble which sadly means that my equity was based on the company’s valuation which was very over-valued. To corroborate this, the company has not grown much in terms of users or revenue. The company also had a layoff just like many startups. As even public or unicorn tech companies are often devalued by 50-75%, I think it is reasonable to say that my equity grant is worth a lot less and I’m being underpaid. Most likely, I will leave the company anyway for some other reasons, but I was curious whether it would be reasonable to ask for significantly more equity. From a pure financial point of view, if a company is valued 75% less then asking for 2x does not seem too unreasonable to me, but I can see that it can be seen as too calculative and the company may be unwilling to grant more equity to that extent. What do you think? Assuming that asking for more equity grants is not unreasonable, I’m also curious how you would bring it up to your manager without looking to be too greedy. I have been a software engineer at a large finance firm for around 2 years out of school. My team works in a hybrid model but most of my meetings are still remote. At least once every couple weeks when I try to ask a question or otherwise participate on a group call or more rarely when I’m responding to a question about my own topic I get interrupted and completely cut off by more senior people on the call, such as my manager, product owner or architect. The other developers and technical people rarely interrupt each other. Some other details: I try to wait for pauses before speaking, and have tried reiterating after the new topic changes again but often it’s just too late. I also tried ignoring the interruption and continuing to speak but I really don’t enjoy having to do this in order to be heard and it feels disrespectful. I’ve noticed this also happens to other more junior members of the team, most of whom are much more reserved in meetings than I am. Another thing to mention is its not really a problem for me during in-person meetings. Am I being a special snowflake to find this annoying and humiliating or is it just par for the course of being a more junior member of the team?

it takes more than asking gpt to decide on syntax disagreements to be a great software engineer this is episode 372 of the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical stuff that goes into the technical field of software development but technical advancements in the field have allowed us to just kind of absolve ourselves of of figuring out disagreements just ask the oracle delegate to the large language model yeah surely that will have no no side effects i wonder how many people will let chat gpt do their taxes this year and get into some real trouble there's probably some subset of those people that are still

going to be better off than they would have been they get it'll mess up less than they would have or something they got lucky but unlucky unluckily luckily unluckily lucky yeah am i saying that right i think you are all right this episode is sponsored by one schema the best way to build csv import into your application jameson would you like to say thank you to our patrons our patreonicals so much thank you to nick cantar brayden canes john grant travis nick hathaway oladapo fadye ragnar jonathan king web tau awesome and 10 testing will angel monkey face emoji ira chan patreon.com we're hiring tescarawas ohio craig motlin i love mavis alice jost owen chardal jenny kim cody sale kensi dodds noah frazier loge the reelect jameson dance committee santa hopar

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question dave i do this comes from an anonymous listener who says i joined a startup at the peak of the tech bubble and just a side note when they said peak tech bubble i thought for sure they were talking about the year 2000 but i guess there's been another tech bubble this one inflated much yeah i'm one bubble behind okay yeah joined startup at the peak which means that my equity was based on the company's valuation which was very overvalued yes i'm hearing numbers that are like 50 reduction when they mark these things to market all right to corroborate this the company has not grown much in terms of users or revenue the company also had a layoff just like many startups as even public or unicorn tech companies are often devalued by 50 to 75 percent which is

true. I think it is reasonable to say that my equity grant is worth a lot less and I'm being underpaid. Most likely, I will leave the company anyway for some other reasons, but I was curious whether it would be reasonable to ask for significantly more equity. From a pure financial point of view, if a company is valued 75% less, then asking for 2x does not seem too unreasonable to me. But I can see that it can be seen as too calculative and the company may be unwilling to grant more equity to that extent. What do you think? Assuming that asking for more equity grant is not unreasonable. I'm also curious how you would bring it up to your manager without looking to be too greedy. Yes. I love that. I love the question of how do I ask for more money

without looking greedy? I kind of want to just address that for a moment because I love, I also have felt this way for many years until I realized that my manager has the same conversations with their manager. Then I realized, wait a minute, they know exactly what I'm doing and they do it it for the same reasons themselves. So I would flush that idea from our minds. It's just, don't worry. How dare you? Can you just imagine your manager like, how dare you be so greedy and then turn around and be like, listen, I need a raise. I'm having to deal with all these questions about getting raises. I need a raise. I think you're assuming that the manager is not capable of some cognitive dissonance though. How so? Well, I think it's possible to go ask your boss for

more money and still think someone is greedy if they ask you for more money i see like you can just like you're already overpaid but i'm i'm special i'm different i'm me oh yeah i see what you're saying is that and i deserve more money completely incapable of empathy i hate it when others ask for more money but i want more money got it yeah yeah i'm pretty sure we're capable of that i don't know it's not a helpful way to think though doesn't make it easier for you to go ask for more money so your company is not the the equity value has certainly not increased as is sort of implicitly promised i mean you can't really predict or promise this stuff but there's there's this implicit contract is too strong of a word i don't know this implicit hope

that you join the startup you get some equity that equity is not worth a ton right now but as the startup grows, it becomes worth it. And then you cash out and it's more money overall than if you'd work somewhere else. I think that's generally not true for most people that work at startups. I think in general, you probably make more money just working somewhere that pays you more just because the chances of payoff and timelines and amount it pays off feels lower. Yeah. This is why venture capital funds invest in many companies, not just one. Yeah, but you can kind of only invest in one. Yeah, and that's actually kind of a frustrating inequity

because your investors in this company, if you told them they could only choose one company to invest in, they'd be like, no way, forget that, that's a terrible idea. And then they're like, now let's talk about your stock option plan. It's like the only stock option plan you could get. Yeah. This is why the key to getting wealthy is actually first get wealthy, then you can invest in lots of companies and make money.

yeah it's uh wealth by induction yeah exactly there there is a basis case that must be satisfied first yeah oh boy well should we talk about kind of hard numbers on this situation sure i uh i like to think that i pay close attention to this market and i've certainly heard anecdotes of companies who have to face reality which by the way many many startups don't have to face this reality for a little bit of time because they're sitting on a treasure chest, a war chest, if you will, of funds that they've raised in a previous fundraising round. And they don't have to confront the reality that their company is worth half of what it was two years ago. Yeah. It's only worth half if you try and raise money and raise that valuation.

Try to raise money or try to sell it. And so these companies now that are facing the music are the ones that have to go raise money and they're meeting with investors and the investors are saying, no way. There's no way your company is worth as much as you thought it was two years ago. So we're willing to invest in you at a valuation about half of what you were valued at two years ago, even though everything about your company might be better. And that is only if you don't have the word AI in your company's name or website. If you do have AI, then you're in good shape. You'll be fine. You can keep riding the valuation bubble train. Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because it's pretty common to hear companies being marked down

50% to 75%, like the question asker mentioned. So that's completely reasonable and a very real possibility for this company. Now, the bad news that I think... Now, I'm not a CFO. I mean, I am the CFO of our podcast, but I guess we haven't raised any venture capital funds. But I'm not a CFO, but... Boy, are you going to be surprised when you check your email. So I may have made some lofty promises. You got some term sheets is what I'm hearing. What I have seen at three or four or five, I don't remember how many startups that I've participated in, is that it is typical to allocate a percentage of the shares of a company

to be used for what's called the employee equity pool, which is a pool of shares that you've set aside. They are not for, you know, the founders basically dilute themselves by that amount. The investors dilute themselves by that amount to make available for compensation to pay workers, usually in the form of stock options, which is what I'm assuming is going on here and not just straight up shares. Anyway, that percentage is fixed. And usually the absolute share count is also fixed between fundraising events.

And so when I think about this question, would it be appropriate for me to go or reasonable for me to go ask for two X, the number of shares. I think about what if everyone did that? And let's say that your 20% employee equity pool is fully tapped. So all those shares are allocated to a person or to, you know, all the employees and you wanted to, everyone wanted to go get double the amount of shares that they had before that would raise the pool to 40%. And someone would have to give up those shares or dilute themselves by another 20 percentage points to get you those shares. You can't just fabricate shares. And so I'm going to say it would be very, very unlikely that a company would do that. The board would not approve that because they're probably investors.

The founders would not want to do that. And instead, what they would turn around and say is, well, I know that our valuation is down. It looks like we all need to work really hard to get that valuation up. Why don't you go build a large language model? Why don't you go do some prompt engineering real quick? Yes, exactly. So I don't think you're going to get it. I mean, they might approve it for onesie twosie, but when they start to see a trend,

they'll be like, whoa, cut this off. We just don't have that many shares to give. Yeah. And by the way, the founders and the investors and anyone who holds equity has also experienced the same 50% loss of value. So now you're saying, hey, I know we all just lost half of our value.

together. But would you give me twice as many shares to make up for it? And by the way, they're going to come from your pocket. So let's just do this, right? This will work. Sorry. It just doesn't work. Yeah. No, yeah. That's a good point. I think part of what you're pointing out is that these are actually a scarce resource. And you can do some maneuvering to dilute and make more shares out of nothing, but you can't. Not out of nothing though, right? I mean, dilution means you made them out of something. Yeah. Yeah. Like you devalued everyone else's shares by a little bit. Yeah. You could maybe target who gets devalued. I don't know. Again, I'm also, I'm also,

I'm not a CFO. Well, yet I'm not even a CFO of this podcast. So you're more qualified than I am. I'm going to start amending my email signature. i i just add had a great day yesterday and on my email signature that's my qualifications just did a really good job yesterday chief of having a great day yesterday i think you're pointing out that these are a scarce resource and it's hard to comprehend that when because the numbers are large and vague and you don't know how many shares are out there and you don't know what all the different liquidation preferences are and there's all these all these levers you can pull yeah but it still is it is a zero-sum game yes even if they aren't all allocated

you mentioned the options pool and maybe there's some left over that means fewer options in the future to grant to new hires so it can seem like monopoly money yeah and sometimes it is until you ask for more of it. Right. Suddenly it's real money. Yeah. You mentioned one thing, Jameson, which is maybe the employee option pool is not fully tapped. And that may be true, but also bear in mind that when, like, let's say you wanted to go sell the company and let's say that only half of the 20% option pool that was allocated have been issued as shares to individuals. That's actually a good thing for people who hold shares now at the point when you're trying to sell the company because what it means is that there's fewer people to pay dollars to. And so when

people are looking at buying the company, they're looking at who all needs to be paid out. And if there are just fewer people that own shares that need to be paid out, then that's actually a higher share price. In this case, call it 10% because you had about 10 percentage points of the 20% employee option pool that aren't paid out or that don't have owners. So that means that the rest of the company gets to, the rest of the shareholders get to take an equal portion of those remaining dollars and assign them out to shares. And that will absolutely be taken into account when someone comes to buy your company. So I think this is sort of getting to answering the second question I asked, which is how do you bring this up? This feels like asking for a raise. And the difference

is it's not as immediately impactful on the cash. It might sometimes be easier for a company to pay someone more money than to give them more equity though yeah depending on the situation jump through and less approval and stuff yeah but if if the company is cash poor then maybe this is more palatable to them however the equity is worth less is not a compelling argument to the company why they should give you more like you were pointing out to earlier dave everyone else's is too like why should they give you specifically more so i i think you need to if you want to do this you need to position it as something that will really help you commit and demonstrate your commitment over time like you could be asking for a raise in cash that gives you some immediate benefit the future

upside might be smaller than if the company does really well so so i think the way you ask for this is not to say hey my equity is worth less can you like fix that yeah you say hey i i'm concerned about my my long-term compensation i also really want to stay here and and believe in this and i want to have our incentives aligned so that if the company does great because i stay here for a long time i make more money and and that's the appeal of equity is is you're kind of aligning those incentives yeah in fact um it's all the more incentive now for you to work really hard to make this company worth something and i think that that's what if you know i wouldn't say this probably i'm a little bit too soft and nice but i mean your manager could very well say

yeah it's down let's get it up get back to work yeah like you can fix this you can help fix this yeah but the you have to you have to make a case to the company why they should do this beyond that you have been harmed yeah exactly like that why are they going to be better off are you uh uh like essential part of the team and this will help secure you for a long time i mean no because it says you're likely going to leave the company anyways so it's probably not going to work but that's a play you can make you or that's an angle you can take where you say look i'm i'm looking for a retention incentive and which by the way is not uncommon for companies to do after big layoffs so you know they're very interested in keeping their staff where it is it's not like they want

to just keep firing people they do need to operate a business so you could you could make that case Like Jameson said, when you ask someone for a raise, you have to think of it like you're going to the store and buying something. You wouldn't go to the store and just say, hey, I'm a frequent customer. You want to keep my business. Can I have this shopping cart for free? You would want to tell them, I'll give you something in exchange for it. I will agree to buy 10 hamburgers a week for the next five weeks if you will give me a 20% discount on the hamburgers. The store might say, okay, yes. And raises are not super different from that. And when you approach it that way, I think you can get creative and find things that would actually be compelling for your company to

offer. So you could say things like, look, like Jameson said, number one thing you can say is all the performance, all the good things you've done to bring value to the company. That's the number one thing they're paying you for anyway. And then the other one is your commitment over time. And then we call that a retention incentive. And so if you're willing to do a retention period where you say, I'll stay for an extra year without, I guess, without telling them you're planning to quit. I don't know. Maybe you would tell them you're planning to quit. I don't know. Maybe play that card either way. But I think a combo, but sorry, better said, I think it's really important to make it clear to the company, the value they're getting in exchange for the dollars

that they're providing you. The marginal extra dollars they're providing you is how you get more money. What you could say is I've been working at half my potential this whole time, and I'm willing to work at 100% of my potential if you give me this huge equity grant. You know how I only code with my left hand? Well, I am not left-handed. That's what I was just thinking of. It'd be like the Princess Bride. I actually do know Colmac. I don't know what the equivalent would be.

Or maybe it'd be you were using the Colmac layout and then you switched to QWERTY. But I actually do know how to touch that. Truly Dvorak. Yeah. Well, I think we've answered it. All right. Good luck.

Jameson, have I told you my one rule? There's a lot of one rules. Hit me with this one rule. Okay, my one rule is never build your own CSV importer. My one rule is to never say never. Well, building a CSV importer always seems like it would be so simple. It's just commas, new lines. How hard could it be?

Well, no. Have you heard of byte order marks, escaping, header mappings? Oh, you need Excel format too? Oh, and your users have comma separated values inside their comma separated values? I've actually tried to do this at a previous company. we tried to build our own csv import and it was almost done for like six months yeah because to get it working in just the initial setup is pretty swift yeah and then there's so much extra that goes into it to really polish it to give error handling and user feedback and handling all the

unexpected stuff that isn't like the test data that you feed into it before you call it done well i have good news for you there's a new product that i wish had existed for the last 20 years to save me from myself it's called one schema one schema provides an api that takes care of the pain of building csv imports it gives you automatic field mapping data validation and much more get world-class csv import into your product without reinventing the comma separated wheel go to oneschema.co soft skills that's oneschema.co soft skills should i read our next question yes go for it this is from a listener named said we could use their name but left the name field blank i've been a software engineer that feels like a bobby tables type of yes

i've been a software engineer at a large finance firm for around two years out of school my team works in a hybrid model but most of my meetings most of my meetings are still remote at least once every couple weeks when i try to ask a question or otherwise participate on a group call or more rarely when i'm responding to a question about my own topic i get interrupted and completely cut off by more senior people on the call such as my manager the product owner or the architect the other developers and technical people rarely interrupt each other some other details i try to wait for pauses before speaking and have tried reiterating after the new topic changes again but it's often just too late i also tried ignoring the interruption and continuing to speak but i

really don't enjoy having to do this in order to be heard and it feels disrespectful i've noticed this also happens to other more junior members of the team most of whom are much more reserved in meetings than i am another thing to mention is it's not really a problem for me during in-person meetings am i being a special snowflake to find this annoying and humiliating or is it just par for the course of being a more junior member of the team oh okay zoom interruptions only and not in person. That's interesting. Yeah. You are being a special snowflake because you are a special snowflake. That's a good thing. You are unique. Uniquely valuable. Your uniqueness is what makes you valuable. And you melt at the slightest. I don't know.

You know, when I read the part that said it only happens over Zoom and not in person, I instantly thought of those quantitative trading firms that try to position their servers closer to the exchanges so that they can beat the trades on pricing because of network latency. Maybe that's what needs to happen here. You need to move closer to wherever Zoom hosts their servers. I mean, the ideal state is you actually live inside

of one of their server rooms. You got a monitor hooked up to one of their servers. Yeah. local host is my zoom server kind of wild if remote kind of spreading out all ended up actually and now you have to all be back together but in the zoom data center yeah you're all in different rooms in the zoom data center oh my goodness optimize for that hop to zoom latency yes you're more vocal than other junior members of the team you speak every couple of weeks though in group meetings oh man once every couple of weeks well no i think what the sasker is saying

is i i get interrupted every couple weeks yeah i probably tries to speak more frequently and maybe successfully that would make more sense i'm just imagining once every few weeks you i feel like you could be very mysterious and adopt a like a guru air if you just uttered softly spoken bits of wisdom every couple weeks and rarely yeah every two weeks oh oh he's speaking shh listen what wisdom shall we hear today i don't like ternary operators yes spoken conditional logic demonstrates a lack of commitment he's like zen i saw that in a tweet one time all of my all of my code should execute all the time yeah why it makes your branch coverage much better if you don't have branches

yeah oh i think i get interrupted more over zoom than outside of zoom and i get interrupted more over zoom in a hybrid environment as opposed to pure remote yeah this is not exhaustively peer-reviewed and researched okay i've worked fully remote for several years and book ended before then was hybrid then fully remote and now i'm hybrid again and i felt like when fully remote meaning everyone on the team was remote there was no office no in-person stuff and i feel like this current gig folks interrupt more i don't know i have a sample size of not that large is four n enough yes yeah n equals four is the academic standard i believe okay that's enough and then it's significant you know i i don't know if i don't know if i can if i've

seen a difference between remote and pure remote and hybrid but i do worry that i am an interrupter yeah you need like a gong wouldn't that be rad well i've often you're you're someone clap clap the gong i just did it bong jameson wants to speak actually i i believe that it would be better if we had a what's the word i'm looking for a an etiquette protocol for for when you want to speak in a Zoom call? Because the problem with speaking in Zoom is that sometimes you speak and sometimes Zoom chooses to not allow your speech to come through because someone else is already speaking and the application seems to really aggressively guard multiple audio sources at the same time.

I don't know if you've ever noticed that. I have noticed that. Yeah. And so sometimes you're actually, you've been censored. It's not so much that you've been interrupted. It's that Zoom literally did not allow your speech to come through. So wouldn't it be great if there was a button you could press that just indicates I have something to say. That's on a separate channel that can't be squelched by just whoever happens to be speaking. I can't tell if you're joking or not. No, I'm serious. Are you aware that Zoom has such a button? Well, the raise your hand button, right? Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, it doesn't work. And I don't mean to say the hand icon doesn't appear when you click it. I just mean to say that that pattern has not caught on

for people it actually i worked somewhere that did a really good job of following that pattern and it was really nice yeah i would think it would be great it kind of caught on in the culture and so it became self-reinforcing because everybody saw it enough that everybody did it and knew it and you if you were speaking you would know i don't know after a couple minutes you sort of check to see or someone would also someone would just interrupt and say hey so-and-so has their hand raised and that was the least interrupt i don't know what the word is interruptive it had the lowest interruption rate seen yeah i think so or the interruptions were you kind of like yield your spot instead of get pushed out by somebody else yeah i really do

think that's great and i i will have to talk offline about how you did that or maybe we should talk online maybe this is actually the answer to the question is we need to establish patterns this question asker needs to establish a pattern of how to hand the conch from person to person when speaking. I don't think I did it. I think it was like that before I got there. You just followed the pattern? Although it would be more of like a manager thing if I said, actually, I did it. But in reality, it was like that before I got there. Yeah, I think it was a part of the culture already. I should talk to some folks there and see. Well, I think that's a great idea. And I've wanted that. I've noticed that the buttons

exist to facilitate that, but I just haven't ever seen a culture that adopts it. It also orders things properly if you do it too. So if you raise your hand and then someone else raises their hand afterwards, it'll shuffle stuff in the participants order to put the people who have their hands raised first and do it in order that they raised them. And it's pretty good. I still think there's a little missing from the Zoom feature here because I've seen meetings. I remember at my last company, we had Google Hangouts, which has a similar feature and you could raise your hand. i don't think it kept them in order like zoom did which is obviously better to keep them in order but they did that occasionally and but it was more common that people would just leave their hand up

and then 10 minutes later someone is like um did you have a comment it's like oh nope sorry i just forgot to lower my hand and that was really i'm really obnoxious because it just basically it destroyed the system because now you don't know who actually wants to speak and who's just left their their hand up just like the someone driving down the road with their blinker on yeah and and it's also there's definitely a critical mass you need of influential people in the company if enough influential people don't do it then it it actually yeah means that you you lose out on your ability to speak in meetings if you're trying to do it so exactly if if a bunch of leaders decide that they're above the raise your hand law then it's over yeah well i think

we took this hard problem and turned it into a different hard problem which is as a junior member of the engineering team get your whole team to adopt this new protocol for communicating yeah what could possibly go wrong yeah let's answer the last question am i being a special snowflake to find this annoying and humiliating nope not at all no yeah now i i will say this and this i i'm gonna say this cautiously because it could come across as arrogant maybe a little superiority complex coming through. So, let me just pre-forgive me, okay, for what I'm about to say. No matter what, I do. Okay, good. Oh, take advantage of this moment. Are you going to change what you're about to say? Oh, this is going to get way worse then. Hang on. Carte blanche,

pre-forgiveness? I have been in meetings where, let's say it's a big meeting, 10 people, And I'm just thinking about the cost of this meeting and how every word needs to be high value or else this thing is a waste of money. And once in a while, you get someone who has low levels of experience, which in this case doesn't mean that they are unskilled or bad or no judgment value, but they are just missing a ton of information. A lot of context is not there, but they're super vocal. and now when that happens other people have to spend their time kind of politely shutting that

conversation thread down because it'll be like hey we're talking about something like high level and strategic and you want to talk about the finer details of some low level thing that's just not even relevant for this audience and so we have to shut that down it's just not appropriate for the meeting we've got real problems to solve here and that what you what that person brings up might be a real problem, but it's not the real problem for this audience to focus on. And so there is a possibility that that is what is happening here, is that you have chosen to raise topics that are either out of scope or too low of strategic importance for the audience that you're communicating with. Now, I don't necessarily think that's happening here and I haven't seen any

evidence that it is, but it's a possibility to keep in mind and maybe that's why you're getting interrupted. So just had to throw that out there. All right. Am I forgiven? Yes. Still, you got one left. You didn't even use up your pre-forgiveness. That was fine. Oh, I'll keep that one in my back pocket. Yeah, just do. If I ever get just appalled at something you say, then remind me of this moment perfect yeah that's definitely possible and i have i don't know if i am aware of being the person making those kind of comments i'm sure i have made them but i definitely recall seeing them and kind of cringing at like oh you just you have no idea what's going on so it can happen yeah i've talked about this before one thing that i have seen is there are

some people who seem to work really well thinking out loud in meetings and they they kind of process stuff quickly when people are speaking and they can put something together and express it clearly verbally quickly and and i remember especially there's one person i worked with who it felt like every meeting i was in with them the meeting turned into someone described the problem and then this person just say says what the answer is okay because they seem to be able to come up with the answer on the fly to everything all right and i did feel like i got interrupted a bunch but i also felt like i was like i i needed to slow down and think more i couldn't keep up and counter interrupt because i was i was like trying to catch up and yeah stuff and work through things

yeah i i call that the speech processing velocity mismatch problem i coined that phrase fancy i just make that up yeah i'm going to create the wikipedia page tonight but okay i have noticed that there are people in this world who speak quickly and or and speak slowly different people and then there are people that can listen to fast speech and there are people who can't And there are some real adversarial combinations in this world where you have slow speech processors and high-speed speech givers. And boy, does that create a bunch of problems, usually for the speech receiver who just feels totally frustrated and like they're getting run around circles. They also, by the way, tend to feel interrupted a lot. The people that speak a lot?

No, the people who listen, who have a slower, what's the right word? A lower speech receiver velocity. you know it's like it's like when you're tuning your radios at different frequencies and it's like well i only do lower frequencies and someone can speak at high frequencies i don't mean the pitch of the sound i mean the the the speed with which like words per minute that are coming out of the mouth yeah like i talked to someone who was in that exact situation and he told me he was working with someone who for a number of years was a very high speed talker and he's more of a low speed receiver. And in fact, he prefers to listen and then go offline and think about it

for a while, maybe overnight even, and then come back after having processed and then have an intelligent response. And boy, that was a frustrating experience for him to be on the other end of that. So that may be what's happening here too. I just reread the question and the question asker specifically mentions this happens when they're trying to ask a question themselves. oh that's rough and yeah that is rough because that means you aren't getting the answers you need yeah the fact that it also seems to be more targeted towards more junior members of the team i wonder if there's some some kind of implicit bias going on here where could be you the the i don't know the interrupters just kind of feel in their bones that they can

interrupt people of lower status maybe not deliberately yeah maybe they wouldn't even say it out loud right it just it just happens yeah or even notice that they're doing it it's possible i think you could talk to your manager about this we haven't used this standard answer for this question yet but if your manager is doing it themselves and also in the meetings where it's happening i think you have two yeah avenues to approach it with you can you can ask them for advice on how to help with this and and that is one thing i've seen be effective actually is if someone more experienced more respected i don't know i don't mean to sound like you are disrespected but yeah i'll use that term i guess make space for people that that can counteract

this interruption i've seen that work effectively another probably my last idea on this is that if you find yourself getting interrupted a lot um one thing you can do is use the chat feature of these meeting applications like zoom where you can just put it out there and sometimes people will see it sometimes they won't but if they see it they can pause at an appropriate time to answer and if they don't see it at least there's a record of you having asked the question so you can get follow-up later yeah i mean you mentioned follow-up later that that can be a good option too it's it's not solving the problem of you getting interrupted but asking in slack or some other venue if you can't get your question out at least helps you get the answer all right hmm well speaking of

answers have we answered the question i think so good luck it's no fun to be interrupted but uh you know we basically spent this whole last episode talking without letting this person talk so maybe we're just as bad it's no fun to be interrupted but boys it's so fun to interrupt and somebody has to be interrupted sorry it has to be you this time for people to interrupt that's if i play video games online and just get stomped by people i like to think you know someone has to lose and i'm helping those people have a good satisfying experience i feel very zen about it so maybe maybe that helps here too all right we'll end with the least helpful advice okay what should people do if they want their own questions answered dave go to soft skills that audio and

click the ask a question button thank you so much to those of you who have written in with questions and thank you so much to people who also have written in follow-ups to tell us how we did in fact we had someone write in this week to give us a follow-up from over 200 episodes ago that was really good to read actually i need to finish reading that one thank you so much for writing in with all of those we really appreciate it it keeps the show going thank you thank you we'll catch you next week Thank you.