Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 396: Enthusiastic scope creep and human search engine

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I’ve recently started a new Gig as a Senior Developer/Tech Lead at a company where we are our own clients, using the software we develop in-house. I’m encountering a bit of a hiccup, though. Our product owner, is primarily focused on support and doesn’t provide formal Acceptance Criteria. This means I spend a lot of time sending follow-up emails to confirm our discussions, drafting these criteria myself, and handling the management of boards and work items. Another challenge is our product owner’s enthusiasm. He’s full of ideas and tends to expand the project scope during our meetings, perhaps not fully realizing the additional development work and the impact on our timelines. I sometimes think that if he wrote down his thoughts, it might give him a clearer picture of the challenges we face in development in keeping up with these changes. I’m in a bit of a quandary here. How can I gently nudge him to take on some of these tasks, or should I discuss with my boss how this is taking up about 1 to 1.5 days of my week? While I’m more than willing to handle it, especially with the prospect of moving into a management role, I also don’t want to set a precedent that creating Acceptance Criteria and managing Work Items are part of a developer’s job scope – at least not to this extent. Any thoughts? Sean asks: Hi Soft Skills Engineering, I love your podcast and I have a question for you. I have a very good memory and I can recall details from a long time ago. This sounds like a great skill, but it also causes me some problems at work. Often, I get asked questions by my colleagues or my boss that are not related to my current tasks or responsibilities. For example, they might ask me about the content of an email that they sent or received a year ago, or the outcome of a meeting that I attended (but also did they). They ask me because they know I probably remember, and they want to avoid searching for the information themselves. This annoys me because it interrupts my work and makes me feel like a human search engine. I want to be helpful, but I also want to focus on my actual work. I can’t redirect them to my boss, because he has a very bad memory himself. How can I deal with this situation without being rude or lying about my memory? How can I set boundaries and expectations with my colleagues and my boss? And without gaslighting them into thinking I already answered their questions, of course. Thank you for your advice.

it takes more than citing your own blog posts in code review to be a great software engineer this is episode 396 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 parts that go into the technical field of software development uh and how to seed the internet with stuff that makes you look right writing it yourself blog posts are an investment in future you for pull requests future arguments how to win arguments in the future dave do you want to thank our our wonderful patrons yes i do big big thanks to dan from drone deploy chase w norton type hero.dev never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver

meomics meomics please deliver trash panda the computer science book.com valentina datafold santa hopar kent c dodds jenny kim owen charlotte craig motlin the stochastic parrot patron.com we're hiring irishan the single question mark character jonathan king web tau awesome end-to-end testing the unsettling nature of not knowing the content at will angel no william angel.net travis braden canes john grant and cody sale if you would like to join this illustrious crew go to softskills.audio and click the support us on patreon button and if you contribute enough we'll say whatever you type into the patreon field that we feel is safe for work and if you contribute any dollar amount greater than zero we will give you an invitation to join our slack workspace

where you can chit chat talk get advice and share hilarious memes what you can't do is gossip though you can chit chat but no we don't tolerate hubbub we do tolerate scuttlebutt though okay yeah i guess you could scuttlebutt is that where you gossip in a pirate accent yar what be the news of the the layoffs this episode is also sponsored by red hat compiler which is a great podcast that you'll hear more about later all right well you want to hear you want to read our first question i would love to yes this is from an anonymous listener who says i've recently started a new gig as a senior as a senior developer slash tech lead at a company where we are our own clients using the software we

develop in-house i'm encountering a bit of a hiccup though our product owner is primarily focused on support and doesn't provide formal acceptance criteria this means i spend a lot of time sending follow-up emails to confirm our discussions drafting these criteria myself and handling the management of boards and work items. Another challenge is our product owner's enthusiasm. He's full of ideas and tends to expand the scope of the project during our meetings, perhaps not fully realizing the additional development work and the impact on our timelines. Sometimes I think that if he wrote down his thoughts, it might give him a clearer picture of the challenges we face in development in keeping up with these changes. I am in a bit

of a quandary here. How can I gently nudge him to take on some of these tasks, or should I discuss with my boss how this is taking up about one and a half days of my week. While I'm more than willing to handle it, especially with the prospect of moving into a management role, I also don't want to set a precedent that creating acceptance criteria and managing work items are part of a developer's job scope, at least not to this extent. Any thoughts? I like the exuberance, how exuberance always turns into more engineering work. Yeah, it'd be funny if they were exuberantly shutting stuff down like of course not we'll never do that what a stupid idea i'm so excited to cancel this feature yeah we've decided not to build your idea oh customers are gonna love it

when we don't ship that i like saying yes to stuff maybe i'm this person which makes me feel good to say yes i've tried to train myself away from saying yes to saying maybe and then later saying no when i don't have to look you in the eyes i'll say maybe in person and no by email yeah you'll have to read a couple paragraphs to find out that i said no in there there'll be like a word puzzle you'll have to decode the first letter of each word in the paragraph or each sentence in the paragraph and then that gives you instructions to a map and the map contains a single mark on it and if you follow it there's a little glass jar buried in the ground with a piece of paper that says no on it this just says no please please don't stop loving me right underneath the

no yeah please don't be mad no i also so i do want to dig into the part at the end of the question i don't want to set the precedent that creating these acceptance criteria and managing work items are part of a developer's job scope they are at your place i guess like the developer's job scope is kind of defined by the stuff that you do and i don't think there's you you might be towards the the high end of how much kind of project management stuff is falling on a developer but there's not like a set in stone assumption across companies that developers are handed acceptance criteria and and don't kind of touch the the status tracking stuff so if you don't want to do that that's pretty that's it's it's valid to not want to do that but i don't think

there's anything inherent about the tasks themselves that mean a developer shouldn't be doing them i mean depending on the tasks here like i'm some of the tasks i see are sending follow-up emails to confirm discussions okay fine criteria acceptance criteria acceptance criteria really are kind of right squarely in the product manager's wheelhouse right yeah but what if you don't have one don't have a product well okay i guess they're the product owner not the product manager. Listen, I don't know how to write code unless a product manager tells me exactly what to write. At some point, yeah, the ambiguity needs to be squeezed out either by the developer deciding stuff when they write code and handing it over or earlier than that. Generally earlier than that is

less expensive. But I don't know what my point is. I don't know. I'm just... I don't know. I feel like what what i what i would want to avoid is the is the like well it's not my job type of vibe yeah for sure for sure someone should do this for me and and no one's doing it so it's i think it's valid to say maybe they're better positioned to do it or or i don't know maybe that's an expectation you have set in the org but someone has to do it and if it's not your product owner then you're providing value by doing it. Yeah, you know, I have found that acceptance criteria are usually geared towards developers.

It's like, okay, developer, here are the acceptance criteria and then the QA person will take those acceptance criteria and validate that the product got built per the criteria. But I've often found that product managers have a hard time writing acceptance criteria that developers can reliably translate into product. and i think it's because that the the exactness of the language that developers expect is a little bit higher than what most product managers are accustomed to providing so it might

say something like yeah the user it needs to be easy for the user to navigate from here to there and it's like well define easy you know like that's what the developer always wants and then they'll be like well they need to be able to do it in three clicks and they're like define click you know it's just like okay stop now is a click when you lift your finger off is it the is the on press or on release right can i can i do four mouse downs but only three mouse ups yeah it's like anyway that's why they pay us the big bucks yeah for the mouse ups and the mouse downs oh my goodness so so i can understand why this this product owner is only so happy just so happy to have this developer writing the acceptance

criteria that the developer themselves is actually going to use to build the product i wonder if the the product owner how do i put it does the product owner have these in their head generally and they're not coming across and it's it's costing time to have this back and forth translation because part of your argument for having them do it could be it saves this back and forth we have to do every time i can i can build stuff faster i can focus more on the building if you are more clear in the what needs to be built and and i think that's a stronger argument as well than like i don't want to do this and i want you to do it instead um we can we can do a better job if you do it we can go faster if you do it is a is an argument sometimes people don't know them until

you force them to articulate them or or they have a lot of unspoken assumptions or i do this a lot where i have an idea of how it works and i don't accurately describe it completely when i translate that to someone else and then it turns out they don't have the same idea i had because they're not me they don't have all that's in my brain so should i discuss with my boss i was taking up my time yeah i i think i think it's fair to bring it up and and if if you feel like it can go faster and you take that approach, both with the product owner and with your boss. And to me, this is a pretty tame, safe, and comfortable conversation that both your product manager and boss will be comfortable having. And for you, just based on the writing here and based

on the question, I think it's probably a very uncomfortable conversation where you feel like you're bringing some emotional context, I think, to this situation where you're like, I think my product manager is doing a bad job and now I need to go tell them they're doing a bad job and I'm worried about offending them or hurting their feelings. But in reality, another way to frame that would be to say, I want to design a different distribution of responsibilities between us that will take advantage of my skills in a different ratio. Right now I'm spending 3.5 days per week writing code, and I would like that to be 4.5 days. What can we do to accomplish that? I suspect if you just tell your boss, hey, did you know I'm spending a lot of my week not

programming? I mean, I know there's a lot that goes into software development that isn't hands on the keyboard coding, but interpreting what people actually want is probably not something your boss would be pumped about taking that much time. yeah managing work items like i don't think you're going to get rid of the status tracking part yeah that's maybe shuffle that around a little bit but but i mean if you're the one doing it you're the one who has to say here's how it is going and if if the product owner is not technical there's also got to be some step that breaks the kind of user facing stuff down into technical tasks. And that's often status related or status adjacent.

One thing I want to zoom in on a little bit is where the developer writes in and says here in the question, our product owner has high enthusiasm, full of ideas that expand the project scope during our meetings. And I thought, you know what? That is actually a product manager's job is to come up with big new ideas. Like it's great. Yeah, imagine if they didn't. Yes, but what I've also found is that in many working relationships like this, there's often the one person who's the big idea person, and then there's the other person that's like the delivery, execution, operationally-minded person, which tends to be me, by the way. It's often I'm the one on the same side as the listener here. The naysayer, as we like to call you.

Yeah. The person who always says, well, that's going to add two weeks to the project or we can't do that. And there are good patterns for interacting with product managers who are super excited about adding lots of scope and ideas. And one of those was suggested here by the listener, which is write down your ideas. it's like yeah in fact anytime you're discussing an idea if you're look if you're if you're just like blue sky dreaming about the future fine brainstorm all you want but if we're actually talking about something we're going to build then you need to have a product feature list in front of you that's in priority order and every time someone has an idea they need to be willing to put that on that list in a certain order with the understanding that the items below it will move down when you insert the new list. And I found that when you do that, it helps people a lot. You know, I've got a customer success leader at my company right now who has lots and lots of

great ideas. And, you know, I say, I'll say to try to figure out the priority, I'll ask a really stupid question, which I try not to ask, which is what's the priority on this, like low, medium, or high? And what do you think they say for everything? Oh, it's extra high. Yeah. It's like all high and i'm like oh okay uh that doesn't help so what they what they what what you actually mean is do you hey customer success leader do you want this or not that's how that question comes across like well of course it's like hi i want it it's stupid of me to even ask that question so what i found is a better question is i actually have a list like a backlog of things that we're building and i say where should this go in the list and oh that totally changes the from a really

dumb question of, do you want this yes or no to, is it more important than this? Is it more important than that? And they go through the list and they slot it in. And we've had so much success over the last year that I've been doing this pattern because we'll sit down together and the customer success leader will be like, okay, this is really important. And I'm like, great. Where does it go? And they're like, uh, 12th on the list. And I'm like, awesome. Perfect. Yeah. I love that because it makes clear the trade-offs. And I talked about saying yes before to i've talked about this before on the show but i like to say yes to anything because generally we can it's not often that someone comes in at work and says hey i'd like to do a technically

impossible task like most things i can squint at and say yeah we could do that and it will cost six months and we will not do anything on our list which is kind of what you're getting at like yeah here's here's the trade-off we're making with that and if you help i don't think you have to outsource the trade-offs completely to other people, but you definitely can help them understand the cost of it. And I think, ultimately, I would expect the product owner to be pretty involved in those trade-off discussions as well. They're not necessarily responsible for providing info on how long stuff takes, but if there's a list of five things with some rough estimates of how long they take, and they say, I've got these great ideas, they should be able to slot them into that list

as well yeah as part of their job i think so write down thoughts i mean we're kind of talking about like some kind of roadmap and yeah part of the value is as a tool for planning and prioritizing not just like a stuff of a list of stuff we're going to do right prospect moving into management role i mean this does sound like stuff you think about more as an engineering management as an engineering manager so yeah if you're interested in management this would be valuable experience, how to figure out how to provide a more observable engineering team, like how to figure out what's going on, when and when things are coming and how to change that when it needs to. Yeah. Well, I'm like, okay, you're doing it 1.5 days a week and you're thinking about going

into management. How about we just make that five days a week? Because that's what the job is. Right. Can we answer the question? Yeah, I think so. Helping people become concrete and translating fuzzy requirements into actionable product development is actually a really valuable skill for software engineers, I think. So I'm a little worried about the time spent here. 1.5 days a week is kind of a lot. That's a lot of time you could be spent cranking out product instead. But there might not be another option here if you don't have someone else on the team who's willing to do the translation. And if the answer is, well, I just want to have the product owner do all of that then you might i don't know you might end up with other problems that are just

as bad or worse where you implemented the wrong requirements or something was unclear in the acceptance criteria but you implemented it wrong and then the product owner's like that's not what i wanted at all and then you got to redo it so it's like would you rather spend 3.5 days of your life of your week coding or would you rather spend three out of four weeks rewriting the code because the requirements are wrong in the first place yeah a bit of a monkey's paw situation yeah for sure but anyway short answer to your question did we answer the question yes ah my favorite answer to any question hey jameson we've been talking about this podcast from red hat called compiler we're kind i guess people might think we're kind of obsessed with it and we are what do you want

to tell people about it today i want to tell them about a new episode i just listened to from compiler called Warning Signs, which is about some red flags or disasters or bad things that have happened in people's careers, which in some ways is the subject of this show. So it felt like it was very synergistic. I don't know. There's something about hearing like a good prod is destroyed story that warms my heart. You particularly like those. I love them. Yeah. And the compiler is good at storytelling about engineering. I think that's one of my favorite things about it yeah and let's not miss this opportunity to say how much better they are than us at production quality if we keep saying it then it becomes like a we're doing we're

doing bad production ironically yeah exactly i know we know it's bad and we choose to because we're cool i think that's how it works right but seriously if you want to listen to a podcast about software development from people who actually know what they're doing and sound great and tell good stories, Red Hat Compiler is the podcast for you. Yep. Go check it out. Dave, will you read our second question for us? Yes, I will. This comes from Sean who says, Hi, Soft Skills Engineering. I love your podcast and have a question for you. I have a very good memory and I can recall details from a long time ago. This sounds like a great skill, but it also causes me some problems at work. Often I get asked questions by my colleagues or my boss that are not related to my current

tasks or responsibilities. For example, they might ask me about the content of an email that they sent or received a year ago or the outcome of a meeting that I attended, but they did also. They ask me because they know I probably remember and they want to avoid searching for the information themselves. This annoys me because it interrupts my work and makes me feel like a human search engine. I want to be helpful, but I also want to focus on my actual work. I can't redirect them to my boss because he has a very bad memory. How can I deal with the situation without being rude or lying about my memory? How can I set boundaries and expectations with my colleagues and my boss and without gaslighting them into thinking i already answered their questions of

course thank you for your advice oh this is awesome wow this is a superpower and with all superpowers it's also a curse yeah great responsibility is what you're observing here yeah in some ways i have a good memory and in some ways i have a terrible memory i have like a good memory for vague shapes of things so i can remember for a long time that we had a discussion about something and then i'll like forget what the decision was or something i know we talked about this very important decision but i don't remember if we leave if we came out with a yes or a no yeah that's part of why i try to write stuff down a lot is because i can i can go find the answer more easily if i write it down this is not the problem that our question asker has

Yeah, I think you need to trigger some memory loss in yourself. Like blunt force cranial trauma? Yeah. Oh, there's a great book called The Anti-Memetics Division. I've talked about SCP on this podcast before, and it's from that universe. The premise is there are ideas that are harmful to have and that will spread aggressively. And so there's this whole division that is devoted to helping people forget stuff. And they also have to make themselves forget stuff.

And it's like, how do you design this organization that the people who work in it forget it exists sometimes and like but then but can still be productive yes yeah well then you need someone like sean around who you're gonna ask these questions to no that'd be a great hazard because then all the bad ideas would get this person or spread through them ah so yeah you got to take some some memory loss things i want to read this book there's also there's also a section that's like ideas that are hard to remember they like slip out of your head so it's kind of both in a way it's a good book i don't know how much it will make sense if you're not in this but i think it's probably reasonable to read if you're not in the space already i don't know it's fiction

that was great yeah yeah well i don't remember i hope yeah i think it is but yeah it's fiction oh man yeah so you have to trigger some brain damage okay and there are a lot of substances we can recommend that'll help with that try newborns those make you not sleep and then you have memory loss yes have a baby or find one i mean it doesn't have to be your baby teenagers also work for that they sleep about the same amount as newborns no don't tell me that i choose to forget that good that meme just slipped right out yep the outcome of a meeting they know i probably remember this is like the classic dynamic that happens at you see this at big companies too where it's hard to get stuff done there's this like bureaucratic process and

there's the one helpful person that knows how to cut through it and get stuff done and often their reward for that is everyone goes to them and asks them for help which could be great if that's their job and uh not great if it's not their job yeah that's part of why you see like these defensive barriers sometimes around orgs internally where part of their part of their work is like fend people off so they don't get inquiries all the time so they can't do the stuff that isn't inbound work yes leave my people alone they're busy yeah yeah you must first fill out these forms in triplicate and then like there is this concern that's relevant to this that a lot of people carry after they've been at a company for a long time.

And that is, am I good at the job title that I have or am I just good at being at this company? Like I know all the tricks and tips to work here, but am I a good software engineer somewhere else? And I think you would, this person with a perfect memory for details like this would probably have that question. Like, am I valuable just because I remember stuff

or am I valuable because I actually contribute as a software engineer? Yeah. Hopefully yes is the answer, but this is, this is especially hard if you like to say yes to people like I do, because someone's asking you for a thing and you can help them. Like you could be helpful right now. And it's going to take you away from other stuff that you probably have to be doing. And probably there's not a thing on your performance review tracking how many times you help someone remember stuff. So they, so they knew where to go look it up. I can't go to my boss because they have a terrible memory i mean i think part of what you could do is at least

make it clear to your boss that you are spending some amount of your time this way and together figure out if you think it's providing value or not because i could see this being enormously valuable like like you mentioned it's it's essential at giant companies especially to be the the the secret keeper the person who who knows the true realities of all the things and where stuff is and who people are yes i'm the archivist yes yes sometimes dysfunctionally valuable if that gets encouraged too much and then you can become you can become the the power behind the throne i guess where was i going with this yes what you don't want is to do a lot of this and then not do a bunch of stuff that your boss thinks should be getting

done instead and and then for your boss to say well why are you spending all your time revealing secrets you should be making widgets instead or whatever like yeah you should not be in that situation you should get some agreement that this is a good use of time and then maybe you could track it and i don't know get get get some visibility into the value you're providing or alternatively their support in telling people no because if you tell a bunch of people no it would be easier to do if if your boss were behind you and could say hey we're trying to help sean focus more on thing x so you'll have to use the search box more or whatever i don't know yeah so they might not be able to answer the questions for you by by you redirecting them to your boss

but they can encourage people to answer their own questions yes gently if that's what they want rudely encourage yes answer your own freaking questions you forgetful morons yes how you want all bosses there's a well-established pattern for solving this exact kind of problem in comic books and movies people with super powers often have secret identities i love it what you could do you might think oh just you know change jobs and don't tell people at the new job how amazing your your memory is but that's not at all what i was thinking i was thinking bring a change of clothes into the office and every once in a while when you want to exercise your memory powers go change into those clothes and they have to those clothes have

to include like thick rimmed glasses with a built-in mustache or something on them so that when you come out you have and you have a name tag that says the name of your alter identity when you come out you can you can demonstrate your powers and impress everyone around the water cooler with your memory skills and answer all these esoteric questions, but only when you want to do it on your time, on your terms. And then when you're done being a superhero, just go change back into your regular clothes and no one will ever ask you anything because they don't even know that you have this superpower. Wait, I missed how you get out of this, get out of changing jobs to do this. Oh, well, I think you have to change jobs. You have to

say goodbye to your old life. I mean, the problem is you didn't follow the superhero rule from the beginning and so now you have to bootstrap your way into it which is of course change jobs yeah you you went to high school in your spider-man costume exactly now they all know you're spider-man everyone knows classic mistake so you're gonna need to actually you're gonna have to rebrand as well yeah because the spider-man guy is compromised i'm man spider a way more disgusting and horrifying superhero i'm a man i'm a spider that looks a little like a man instead of a man that looks a little like a spider yeah oh i would i would that's got to be a super villain right i have eight legs and lots of eyes yeah but also i have a charming mustache of a man

oh but i i got problems doing all my homework in time without being rude or lying about my memory yeah you could also batch stuff up you could say i will have office hours bring me your questions that might sound a little presumptuous arrogant yes yeah but you could also i mean yeah you could you could you could use the the jameson tactic of not saying yes of saying maybe or like yes once i finish this thing and you kind of batch it all up so that at least could help you i mean you still have to be interrupted i guess to field that and redirect it also i mean how much okay so it's annoying to be interrupted a lot how much are you really interrupted i mean it doesn't take long obviously this is very easy

for you to do so i don't imagine it takes very long to answer these questions but i just have this idea where you have like the office space boss walks up to your cubicle leans on the wall and says so yeah uh april 17th 2016 i sent an email can you tell me what's in it and you're like yeah that's the one where you xyz like it doesn't take very long and i worry that if you don't do this maybe no one will talk to you and that would be really sad too that's not where i thought that sentence was going that was more just tongue in cheek but but like i wonder if i wonder if you could change a mindset on this and just like embrace it and say actually i love being the go-to person for random memory questions it's my thing you know some people can do hacky sack

really well and i can answer questions from seven years ago i can see that being torture for some people yeah you're probably right i think the cost of context con context i feel like elmer but the cost of context switching is probably different for different people and i think there are some people who are able to context switch more quickly where they can get pulled out and back into the thing they were doing i know people who it's it's very expensive even if the thing they have to switch to is like a couple minutes it's they want to stay on it because then they have all these cool ideas on it and then take some while to spin back up on what they were doing so even if the actual time to answer the question is short it wouldn't take too many of these to just

kill your day yeah hmm you could write down your answers then if you get enough of the same question i don't know if this works too well because the questions might be varied enough but you could you could pivot to making the knowledge base and then tell people to search that thing they won't search instead of the email client they won't search i guess yeah i don't know i've never had this problem as the one who does not have a good memory yeah it's very interesting I mean, this is a very, a very eclectic little, eclectic is not the right word. It's a very esoteric skill that not a lot of people have. And so I'll bet you that people just have no idea that this bothers you so much.

You know, it makes you feel objectified a little bit, like you're nothing but a tool who remembers things well. You're like the chat GPT of the office, you know? Yeah. And you get interrupted a lot. And, you know, I don't know if there's much you can do about that other than like literally changing jobs and just not revealing this amazing skill you have if you can find a way to kind of, I don't know, kind of like a superhero blending in. It's like Clark Kent, you know, blending in with everybody else. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of AI startups trying to do this for you. It's true. just hand us all of your data and then we'll give you this magic box you can type any question and we'll search all of it or we'll just give you sean yeah for the same price the secret power behind all these startups you could also go on tour doing some kind of show where you uh yeah i was just thinking that what was the fable about was that john henry who was racing against the machine of some kind yes yeah it's like ask a random question to this fancy ai product and to

sean and who does it fast yeah like a memory thing i've actually heard of people who have just an absolutely amazing ability to remember every detail of every moment of their life like you and it was verifiable stuff like what was the weather on thursday you know january 12th 1998 and they'd be like, let's see, it was 65. The high was 65 and there was a little rain in the afternoon. Go look it up. Sure enough, boom. And all those people said that it was torture.

Just having the skill to remember everything was awful because they couldn't forget the terrible things that happened to them. And I think about Sean, how Sean's like, I can remember not only the answers to the questions you've asked me, I can remember every annoying question you've asked me. like i know you've asked me this question three times it's just torture i feel bad for sean i feel bad until i forget i on the other hand have no capacity for shame or guilt because i can't remember what i did yesterday that's your secret to success you want to feel good about

yourself just don't remember all the terrible things you've done all right have we answered the question i think so sean good luck this is a very interesting situation. And unfortunately, I think you might be up against human nature here. There might not be much we can do except declaring social bankruptcy so that you disavow relationships with everyone you know, so no one can harvest your skills like this anymore. Yes. I love it. I love it. All right. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? They can go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. I almost merged click and ask into one verb, which is klisk. So you can go klisk a question there and you can fill out our

little form where you can put in your name or not, or you can put in Jameson's birthday. And if you guess that right, we'll send you a prize and then you can ask us a question. Or what we'd also like you to do is use that same form to tell us about your experience taking or rejecting our advice. We love to hear the feedback. And if we like your feedback, we'll share it on the air, especially if things went really badly for taking our advice, which you will become a cautionary tail for others to to avoid doing what we suggest which which we always recommend avoiding doing what we suggest but not this we recommend yeah there's a paradox yeah there is there a paradox there not if we have a carve out we recommend avoiding everything we say except this thing

okay but except no because then except that thing that you just i'm tired we got to get out of here All right. We'll catch you next week.