Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 440: How do I help my boss not burn out and should I tell people I'm older than I am?

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Stefan Help! Most of the time people ask questions about issues that already happened. I however, would like to prevent one. I am a young Tech Lead and really love my responsibilities, team and especially my manager. With the help of your podcast I could even resolve my last issue regarding compensation. Of course I dutifully did my part and reallocated some of my payment increase to finance Jamisons yacht. My very awesome manager “Bob” is so great that he has to manage 4 teams. Naturally, because Bob and those 4 teams are doing great, Bob gets rewarded with even more work. In his “free time” Bob is a parent of two teenagers which is also not necessarily known for being a stress free environment. Lately I noticed that Bob is more stressed than usual. Bob told me that he wakes up in the middle of the night because he remembers missed TODOs in the job. I also see this change in his body language and general demeanour. Now that a very critical project is coming up, Bob, as the go to person for more work has to allocate a significant time of his day to support this project. I fear that Bob is on a path to burnout and this new project might be the last drop. I would really hate to get a different manager. Statistics claim it will probably be worse… Also I really wish for Bob to be well and health, too. ;) How can I help Bob in his situation? How do I address those concerns with him without looking condescending? We have a good and open but not close relationship, that I would not like to ruin by overstepping my bounds. Thank you very much. I love the podcast. You make me laugh and learn with every single episode. You rock! I am a very young senior engineer at a big tech company and I think nobody really knows how young I actually am. I just turned 24 and usually in prior jobs other developers started hating me once they found out that I am this young and already in a senior role. Here at the current place, I have the feeling that all of the engineers in levels below me are already a lot older and have more years of experience under their belt. Also, I think they do not know about my age, because I never shared that in the recruiting process, nor later on. Usually people assume I am in my early 30’s and have a baby face, but when I tell them that I am a baby face because I am actually young, they become envious and things go south from there. Should I keep this a secret or am I playing too much into this? PS: I am also already married and have kids, so that could make them assume that I am older.

takes more than spending a few minutes thinking to avoid weeks of coding to be a great software engineer this is episode 440 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is your weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into this the sir the technical field of software development You caught that mid-syllable. That was impressive. I did, yeah. And you know, S and T are right together in the alphabet.

So I'm going to blame that for why I messed it up. Now I forgot what I was saying. I don't know. You know, I picked this intro because I did the opposite, where I spent weeks coding and then a couple minutes thinking and throwing all that work away. And I'm encouraging you to not repeat my mistake. Do that in reverse order.

Throw it away before you write it. Yeah, do the other thing. that's not what this show is about I mean I guess that part is I don't know I'm confused Dave do you want to read our patrons yes big thank you to those that are contributing at a level where they shout out their name or whatever they type into the

Patreon name field every week this week that goes to the following people this question comes from an anonymous listener they say hi Dave and Jameson what is your favorite color Alexander Kuznetsov 10 print Lucas Morton is cool go to 10

Nick Molino opt opt attribute error none type object has no attribute two string javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel alexa set an alarm at 4 a.m oh my gosh my alexa just did it did it work i am not making this up alexa cancel 4 a.m alarm that didn't work either crap alexa cancel 4 a.m alarm okay fixed all right become a senior engineer.com alexa only respects patreon donation names you'll have to donate to the podcast now and have us read it out next week yes and now that you know there actually is an echo device in my room where i record this just have fun with that all right okay unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton dave do you want to

read our first question gotcha i'm dave didn't work that time advent of typescript is here check out advent of ts.com never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mix meow mix please deliver trash panda kyle boss can't see dodds nevar is not just a planet in the vulcan system jenny kim owen chartle the stochastic parrot helicone.ai best observability tool for ai red panda is best panda typescript is a microsoft conspiracy jonathan king znai beautiful functional user documentation the artless sorry the artist formerly known as bracket object object bracket Cody sailing to

William Angel dot net I'm a good little podcast host and I will say whatever my soft skillets right Travis Braden Cain's John Grant this person's name is too hard to pronounce Joe Grossberg if you would like to join this illustrious crew I keep

meaning to change this but I keep forgetting but not this time take the I hear you like movies involving time travel. Los Cronocrimenes is a great one. Don't watch the trailer. It's not good. Cody Sale. And yes, I did watch Cronocrimenes, and it was awesome.

Really? Yeah, it was great. All right. It's in Spanish. I watched it with English subtitles, which is also great, and I loved it. Don't you speak Spanish? I do. So that's part of why it was great.

I don't speak great Spanish, but it was good to brush up. And this was Spanish from Spain, which is not the dialect I learned. So it's like, it would be like you've studied American English as a second language, and then you have to talk to someone with an Irish accent. And it's like, it's pretty different. And it was great. It was really cool. I hadn't seen that kind of time travel pattern, but I really liked it.

I really liked it. All right. Second recommendation. I'll have to check it out. I have a follow-up from a listener who asked a previous question. this was from episode 427 regarding the nine hour time shift so this was somebody who was i think debating taking a job with a time shift at a big tech company yeah where they would be working like noon to nine every day or something like that yeah all right here's their follow-up

if you recall i'm working afternoon till midnight i have two kids and a wife i'm about two months now into the new job at first it was hell at second it was hell but slightly more manageable and now I have learned to not feel pain anymore. That's a superpower. Jokes aside, you're immune to hell now. Jokes aside, it was actually really hard to manage at first, especially for my wife who was getting the kids ready in the morning while I'm still sleeping and doing bedtime on her own while I work.

Oh, man. Those are the two most stressful times of the day for me is getting kids ready in the morning and bedtime. Maybe I need to take a job that's nine hours off. Just abandon my wife to those things. I'm sorry. My dear spouse, listen, I've taken a job. It's two shifts per day, one in the morning and one at night.

I have on purpose, without needing to at all, opted out of the hardest parts of the day for us. Yes. I love you. Good luck. Yes. This is not a recipe for a successful partnership in childhood. Yeah, no.

This is me saying I love you with my words and I hate you with my job choice. Yes. Okay, keep going. Not implying that's what you're doing here. Sorry. Yeah, that's not. Back to the feedback. I do the dishes at 1 a.m. in the morning, so you see things are a bit different here.

The job itself is extremely challenging and overwhelming, but both me and my wife are somehow starting to manage things, and it's becoming our new normal. I'm actually really enjoying the challenges of my job lately, and I will not quit unless my wife wants me to. We also need the big tech money, to be honest. Yeah. There, it all comes down to this. Yeah. Well, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I assume this isn't long-term sustainable forever, but I mean, tech tenures

are not forever also, so. Well, if it's not long, the only reason it wouldn't be long-term sustainable is if this person is unable to sustain their ability to not feel pain. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad you called out that your wife is affected by this because partners are affected by jobs, and this is a big one. So it sounds like you're approaching it with the right mindset of like, hey, this is a thing that impacts us both, not just a my job thing.

Seems like it's working out for now. I can't remember what advice we gave, but I take credit for this. Yeah, if it worked out, we're happy we provided whatever advice we probably did. Yeah. Thank you for following up. And if you have had a question answered and you have a follow up, please write in and let us know. We love to hear about it and love to read about it. And everyone else would like to hear as well.

like it's like did this actually work you know yeah i think people would like to know yeah what you do did it work all right dave you want to read our first question yes i do this comes from a listener named steven or stefan one of those two it says help most of the time people ask questions about issues that already happened i however would like to prevent one i am a young tech lead and really love my responsibilities team and especially my manager with the help of your podcast, I could even resolve my last issue regarding compensation. Of course, I dutifully did my part and reallocated some of my payment increase to finance Jameson's yacht. Oh, thank you. My very awesome manager, Bob, that's Bob in quotes. So I think Bob is just a nickname to

preserve the anonymity of the actual Bob. My very awesome manager, Bob, it's so great that he has to manage four teams. Naturally, because Bob and those four teams are doing great, Bob gets rewarded with even more work in his quote free time bob is a parent of two teenagers which is also not necessarily known for being a stress-free environment lately i notice that bob is more stressed than usual bob told me that he wakes up in the middle of the night because he remembers missed to do's in the job i also see this change in his body language and general demeanor now that a very critical project is coming up bob as the go-to person for more work has to allocate a significant time of his day to support this project i fear that bob is on a path to burnout

out and this new project might be the last drop. I would really hate to get a different manager and statistics claim it will probably be worse. Also, I really wish for Bob to be well and healthy too. How can I help Bob in this situation? How do I address those concerns with him without looking condescending? We have a good and open but not close relationship that I would not like to ruin by overstepping my bounds. Thank you very much. I love the podcast. You make me laugh and learn with every single episode you rock well thank you appreciate the kind words and the you know i'll name a plank on my yacht after you it's like the patreon we'll put jameson will inscribe your patreon name into one plank on

his yacht it's like how if you donate to a museum they put a little brick somewhere with your name on yes that's exactly what i was thinking yeah that's a really good idea i'll bet you could build one one millionth of one yacht it's like that million pixels website from the the was that the early yes the million dollar home page yeah one dollar per pixel i just i only learned about that a month or two ago ah this is like a 20 year old website and it was a sensation the million milliondollarhomepage.com i think it's what it's called amazing um still live i love the that like playful internet stuff yeah okay good question four teams more work bob is stressed new project yeah two teenagers i think i've been bob in large degree where i've had a lot of stuff at work and

felt like things were generally going well and I was going nuts because I was so busy and stressed I guess more stressed than busy and I've actually had someone on my team try to do this and in hindsight I recognized what they were trying to do and in the moment I did not I was not like upset at them or anything but they several times would say you just seem really stressed lately and I think this was their attempt to try to help and say kind of what can I do and and hey don't die you know um but i ended up being so stressed that i quit this job so it didn't work i did not listen but i did not at all feel like oh how dare you you're overstepping my bounds it actually felt nice that they were expressing concern about me i just didn't really do anything

useful with it but i i think if bob is a great manager and is stressed and you have a good relationship, I think it's pretty unlikely that bringing this up will result in Bob flipping out on you or being offended or anything. I just want to put that concern to rest. I don't know if it'll work, but it won't cause disaster. If Bob is anything like me, Bob has a self-awareness problem. And if Bob is anything also like me, he really appreciates it when people come and say, hey you seem super stressed like oh now that you mention it i am yeah i'm trying to think back on this situation and i'm pretty sure i i felt like yeah i am really stressed and there's just nothing to do about it like i can't do anything about it there's just so much to do and that that

part is false meaning you kind of weave this false narrative that there's you just can't change the circumstances yeah like that's just what it takes i just have to sacrifice myself for this corporate entity the only way out is through it yeah like it's not for the corporate entity it's for the the teams that i like and the people i enjoy working with but i definitely have this self sacrificing like i am i am shielding them from the pain by taking on all this additional stress and yeah some of that is definitely true like it's nice to not have to worry about stuff but it can go too far it feels like that's what's happened maybe a bit of a balance yes yes what could this person i'm trying to think what could they have done they said hey is there

anything i can do and i said nope i don't think that's true i think there was stuff they could have done i just didn't have the answers at the time yeah maybe you could instead of saying hey certainly useful to check in and say hey you seem really stressed like what can i do to help you could you could come with suggestions of what to do to help also is there anything you can do to help lighten the load about all these other teams bob has to take care of while they're dealing with this critical project you know yeah can't just pile more stuff on forever that might be a fun experiment to see where the breaking point actually is and what does it look like when Bob breaks. How can Bob ever learn where his limits are? Okay. I'm going to teach him with pain.

What do you think, Dave? I think whenever it comes to unsustainable effort, where either the quantity or the nature of the work that you are doing is clearly something that cannot be sustained in the long term, you're now dealing with a ticking time bomb. Because eventually something is going to happen that will cause Bob to either not work here anymore or his body will revolt in such a way that he can't work there anymore. Physical illness, burnout, psychological effects, something will change. You know, the beauty of our natural universe is that unsustainable things are unsustainable. And so if you don't want to watch that ball of fire engulf your teams and Bob as a manager, but instead give him a chance

to stave it off, then yeah, I would actually do what you were talking about earlier, Jameson, which is go to Bob. Even if I didn't have a super close relationship, I would probably just state the facts. Like, Bob, I can tell that you've got more on your plate than will allow you to do. and here insert objective fact, not just like you seem stressed, although you could say that, I don't think it would hurt. But if you really want to get concrete results, I would say, listen, Bob, we need you to do the following things on this project. We get a lot of value from you when you do it. Like the question answer mentioned decision making. And I've noticed that your time is not available to do that critical function for our team. And as a result, the

following outcomes have taken place. You know, insert example here, like decisions have been delayed. We made a bad call on something and had to rework some things. You know, I'm sure you can come up with a few things. Then let Bob choose how to respond to that. Because realistically, you can't do anything directly to fix this, but Bob can. Like nothing, none of these situations are permanently intractable. But the question is, will he choose to do so? And I found that you can maximize the chance that they will do it by giving them very objective, clear things that need to happen. Now, that's just kind of the selfish view, like, what can I do about my team? There is another option here. Well, there is another dimension to this problem, which is Bob's

own health. And you, because you're not a completely self-absorbed, terrible human being, you care about Bob. And I think people really appreciate knowing that other people care about them. And I would say that, like, Bob, I care about you and your health and your well-being. And I can tell that things are not as great in that department as they once were. And just see where it goes from there which is why i've signed us up for a 5k we'll run that stress off there's there's definitely this trap this failure mode where if you're an engineering leader to use a highfalutin very linkedin-y phrase you are used to thinking about systems and mechanisms and how you build out processes and i don't know you you you see growth in an in a particular technical system

and plan how to make that growth sustainable. And there is this weird blind spot where, especially if you really value helping and serving other people and kind of making stuff work and pitching in, you kind of like don't apply all that thinking to yourself and your position in the org. So you would never look at an engineer on call

just completely swamped by responsibilities and pulled in too many directions and say, well, they just have to suck it up and keep going and try even harder but it's it is easy to just say that about yourself when like in this on-call situation the answer is you you build some kind of mechanism to fix the problem you don't just like grit your teeth and suck it up even harder but it is yeah you mentioned lack of self-awareness i don't know i think people in general are not very self-aware and i certainly am not oh really so you i must be really self-unaware because you strike me as very self-aware

ah see i'm not even self-aware enough to know that i am self-aware but i guess my point is there there are there are mechanisms that bob needs to build into his organization to avoid him being this single point of failure for everything and while you're making at work it can actually feel very rewarding to say look at all this stuff i'm doing i'm like so important and helpful and and so there there might even be some incentives to not do that while things are going well that can make it hard to recognize i have to i have to remove myself from from the dependency chain here as much but i do feel like that's what has to happen i don't know how that you politely bring that up to bob but if there really is this critical project coming up

with bob he has to be the go-to person on it then he's got to stop doing other stuff and and yeah i don't know four teams report to bob the dumb answer not knowing those teams or the org structure at the company is like it sounds like you need some managers on those teams you know Yeah. Sounds like Bob needs some abstraction. So he is not as directly involved all the time with those teams. It could very much be the case that Bob is absorbing an externality that has been imposed upon him by a business that is taking advantage of Bob's willingness to save money. And the money they save is exactly what you just called out, more headcount. It could very well be that more headcount is really needed for a sustainable solution here.

Or, I mean, yeah, like saying, well, we need to hire four managers is probably not going to happen. yeah no maybe you you might be able to have bob distribute some of that authority and responsibility to someone already on the team so you're not you're not hiring a manager but you're kind of convincing someone to take on more of a management role that's already on the team or you bob is i guess you could do it for bob and say hey i solved it you've got managers now yeah hmm yeah i don't know this is a tricky situation i do think talking to bob about it is a pretty solid approach though. And you know, I just remembered another time when this happened to me, this was at a different job and it was not a, I did hear similar things from people

who reported to me like, man, you just seem so stressed out and distracted and recognize in hindsight, that was them trying to say like, Hey, you need to, you need to not do it the way you're doing it. But I actually had a boss who came from the other direction was like, Hey, it's not going well because you are so you are you are too spread thin and too distracted and split across different things and that's a much different situation than than what you are in but it was easier to understand it as a problem not as a like badge of oh look how hard i work and how important i am when someone brought up like the negative impacts of it instead of just hey you seem stressed yes especially the negative impacts on people that you thought you were

shielding from the yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah so if you can if you feel like you can do that without i don't know harming the relationship or causing problems that might be easier to pay attention to than just like you seem stressed and bob saying yeah i'm working so hard to help you all so it is stressful well have we answered the question i think so uh one one thing we didn't say was go over bob's head and tell bob's managers that bob is overworked and underpaid which could might be a viable strategy but might have some negative side effects too well you said underpaid too i feel like there's not a world in which bob gets a raise and is like ah the stress is gone you know like great probably wouldn't say no to more money but that wouldn't resolve the

the problem yeah maybe bob can then hire his own manager out of his own pocket yeah like i'm so big that i can outsource it's like perfect yeah all right i i i don't know we've answered it there's an answer in there somewhere yeah i'm sure you pull it out yeah exercise for the listener all right you want to read our next one yes i do this is from i think an anonymous listener who says i'm a very young senior engineer at a big tech company and i think nobody really knows how young i actually am i just turned 24 and usually in prior jobs other developers started hating me once they found out i am this young and already in a senior role here at the current place i have the feeling that all the engineers in levels below me are already

a lot older and have more years of experience under their belt also i think they do not know about my age because i have never shared that in the recruiting process nor later on usually people assume i am in my early 30s and have a baby face but when i tell them that i have a baby face because i am actually young they become envious and things go south from there should i keep this a secret or am i playing too much into this p.s i'm also already married and have kids so that could make them assume that i am older yes i'm surprised married with kids that that hasn't aged your face like you still have a baby face i wonder how much of a baby face you would have with no kids it's like super baby yeah or maybe you're absorbing their life force or something oh yeah

you're de-aging yeah it's all that i mean assume you hook an ivy up to them and get some of their blood every night or something yeah their life force the traditional parent parenting tactic yeah where you just get younger looking and more youthful because you had kids yeah i've seen that a lot yeah yeah oh this is great no i'm i just have a baby face not not because i have a baby face but actually i am a baby yeah i have a face it is an age-appropriate age i got told i had a baby face for many years people haven't said that to me in a while I don't know.

I think you still have a babyish face, a face that looks younger than your years. Well, let's just say there's a reason we do this show audio only. Now, you've got a baby voice for sure. All the little coos, all the wailing we edit out. The occasional spit up.

Yeah. Yeah. Should I keep this a secret or i mean what do you think that means keep it a secret i mean i think it just means like don't don't really disclose like if someone says wow you have such a baby face just be like i know right haha but not like i'm 24 yeah i could see this being really obnoxious if someone made a big deal out of it of like i'm climbing the ladder quickly and look how high of a position i too Too quickly.

Yeah. Quicker than me. Every once in a while, I am reminded that there are other worlds out there that I'm not a part of. And some of them are, there are people who really actually deliberately participate in really intense status competitions and enjoy it and try to like crush their opponents who are the people all around them. And yeah, not for me, but. These people make me want to do a baby spit up. Yeah. so i guess i'm assuming that you're not you're not trying to prove to them you actually are

way better than them yes like why why have you achieved less by age 35 than i have achieved by age 24 huh yeah hey stand up no i'm working on this ticket no blockers also i just want to ask you hey what were you doing when you're my age yes and everyone's like goofing off i was doing nothing productive yeah well i've got two kids and a successful career as a tech lead so no blockers yeah no my career no blockers on my career yeah so maybe not that like maybe we're recommending not doing that yeah don't do that people's faces. Yeah. So I think you're right, James. And this highly depends on the type of people you find yourself surrounded by. If you were surrounded by people like me, who I'm 45,

I love young people. I'm trying not to be ageist here. I have no problem whatsoever with young, ambitious people who have achieved more than I remember achieving at that age. And I love it. I think it's great. I have nothing but admiration for it. I want people like that on my team. I think it's fantastic. I feel no amount of resentment, even though at age 24, I was a big dummy. I think it's great. You're also not really competing. You would not be this person's peer. Yeah, I'm a little too old, right? I'm in a slightly different tier. So that's why I say, if you find yourself surrounded by people who have my mentality, which my mentality maybe is just normal for my age and for the current job function that I occupy. But let's say all your

peers have the same attitude that I just happen to have, I think it would be fine. But you got to kind of feel that out, I think. Because the last thing you'd want to do is introduce a reason for someone to have resentment. Because if someone really doubles down on resentment like this, like A, they're not really a great team player. First of all, let's just like set that out there. But B, it can really harm the productivity of the team if they're allocating brain cycles to worrying about the resentment that they have or just experiencing resentment instead of focusing on the team's job,

then that can't be better than the opposite where it's just not a part of the psyche. Yeah, yeah. It's like how fraud is outrageously inefficient, right? Like you steal a million dollars worth of stuff and you make 10 grand from it, but it still costs someone that million dollars. Like if someone is upset by this and resentful

and, I don't know, competing or mad about it, it's cost the team way more than whatever paltry benefit they might get by putting you in your place. Benefit, like air quotes, benefit. Yeah. What benefit is there? The benefit is I soothed my resentment a little bit.

This is very generic advice, but I would try to be humble and effective. One way this could go wrong is if, I mean, you don't walk around with your age written down on your name card or i don't know and your zoom status tattooed on your forehead yeah but like you look young i don't know and and you can kind of tell even if someone is very brilliant technically there's just stuff that comes from experience you just have heard of more things and have screwed things up in more ways so you can kind of tell even if they're very talented

and effective like oh they they are missing this big chunk of experience and if you are self-aware about that and not trying to hide it or seem like you know more or smarter than you are that's fine but i think it could rub people the wrong way if they think wait this person is quite young they're this hot shot that seems to think they know everything and they don't even i don't know they haven't even heard of xml or whatever the yeah thing they decide to pick that you should have known about but you don't because there's always going to be something no matter your age it just might bother people more if you are younger and you seem like you believe you know it all already so that's not directly related to age but i would i would say it could maybe

diffuse any concerns people have about your age if you are clear about your capabilities and experience and don't try and pretend like you know more than you do or aren't arrogant about Yeah, for sure. That can only make it worse. Yeah. I actually experienced this a little bit. Not quite as much here, but I was 24 years old when I got my first, quote, real job out of college. And I was hired into a company with a cohort of other recent college graduates. There were probably four of us into a team of about 15 or 20 people. And all of the other existing team members who had already been with the company, they were all 45 plus, maybe even 50 plus. So it was kind of a, just

numerically only speaking, it was on the older side of any team that I've been to. Like the median age at that company was probably higher than any other company I've worked for in the ensuing 20 years since then. And those guys just had fun with it, with me. I mean, I remember we had to go on a work trip together and I was 24 and they were joking about how I wasn't old enough to rent a car on the trip. And I'm like, oh man, it was so funny. But it worked. It worked well because they had no expectation that I was their equal in almost any way. They expected me to be more junior, to have less experience, to be more just stupid. And I was all of those things. So I met their mold. Now, if you had hired me into a group of 30 somethings, which is what I'm

assuming here because they said 30s well they assume people assume that you're in your 30s and you are expected to be their peers not not like on a lower rung of the ladder i think it is a little more tricky and i probably just would not advertise my age that much i might even go so far as to say i just would not tell anyone unless it was someone i trusted and they asked but it's not like if someone asked i'd be like no i'm not telling you and i definitely wouldn't lie about it but i would try i would try to make it not be an issue the cutoff for gen z is born after 1997 so i think yeah if if you can uh 97 to 2012 is gen z this person was born in the year 2000 yeah so you're you're right at that edge but if you can kind of convince them you're a young

millennial what are the millennial stereotypes so you know how boomer humor is like oh my wife i hate her so much ha ha ha that's boomer humor yeah there's this genre of boomer humor which is like my stupid wife i mean really i don't know how real it is but stereotypically i think a stereotypical millennial humor is like ha ha ha i hate myself i'm depressed so you can kind of lean into that a little bit. Didn't millennial humor give us like avocado toast? No, I think that was when millennials were the young resented whippersnappers and that was the criticism against us. We've changed. I forgot. To me, millennials are still the young resented whippersnappers. No, that's Gen Alpha now. I know. Okay, got you. So now that millennials

are older, we have more cynical jokes to make about them. Is that what I'm hearing? no this is the jokes that millennials make right like oh okay like gen z humor is sort of like surreal memes i'd say is how i characterize it and millennial humor is more like haha i'm depressed i'm sad pogliacci the clown okay so yeah adopt that a little bit okay got it stereotypical i don't know adopt the trappings of millennialism so yeah i see i see yeah like is there a way to dress that would make you appear more millennial probably but i am too much a part of it to look at the outside listen see what that jameson will post like a full body fit check photo on our website for you to just reference and just start dressing like that and

you're gonna be great well currently i'm in sweatpants with holes in them but i think those are evergreen any generation can benefit from wearing those i was gonna say that's my generation I should clarify, holes where there shouldn't be holes. Normally, sweatpants have at least three holes for your legs and your torso, but there's extra ones in these sweatpants. You have four plus holes? Yes. Too many.

Good. Okay. I think this is sound advice. How to look older. Yeah. Just seem older. Be a millennial. Well, I'll tell you what.

I tell you how I dealt with my baby face because I really did. I wasn't joking when I said people used to tell me I had a baby face. my wife got very tired of people thinking that she had married a 15-year-old boy. And she insisted that I grow a beard. Now, this works for approximately 50% of the population. Yes. If you find yourself in that cohort, you can apply this technique. And it solved the problem instantly for her. And I can only imagine... I'm not saying she grew a beard, although that would be a very interesting way to solve this problem of your husband having a baby face. And so you

grow a beard then people stop talking about your husband's baby face yeah exactly yeah there's other redirection topics but yeah that's what i did and it probably added a good five to ten years to my perceived age so there you go i so i've had a beard for a while whenever i shave it people always say oh you look so much younger but there's this like shocked quality to their voice oh that i'm trying to figure out how to interpret that does that mean they think i'm i'm very old yeah And they're like, oh, you're actually more what your actual age is. Or do I actually, I don't think I look younger than my age when I shave my beard. I think I just look older than my age normally.

With a beard. Yeah. Is that what it is? I think so. I mean, I guess I'm agreeing with you. Do that if you can. Grow the beard. Yeah.

Maybe glasses will help. Like maybe there's not even any lenses in them. Yeah, they won't talk about your age as much, I guess. So talk about how weird and pretentious you are trying to adopt fake affectations. Yeah. Your Steve Jobs turtleneck is your Warby Parker glasses with no lenses in them that you think make you look sophisticated and wise. Yeah.

Make them resent you for something else. Good call. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's easier to feel resentment about something that's not actually real. Yeah. It won't hurt as much. Yeah.

We don't resent the question asker because of how young they are and how successful they are. We resent them because of how just much of a jerk they are to everyone around them all the time. I'm not really a jerk. I just play one at work. Yes. It's working. You don't care about how old I am.

It's like magic misdirection away from my age. Just a complete jerk. Failed successfully. Okay. Have we answered it? I think so. The good news is this is a temporary problem. it doesn't feel like it's temporary right now but i'll tell you what you're gonna wake up one

morning and it's gonna be five years later and then you're gonna be like oh i am the 30 something now and then you're gonna look around and be like who's that pretentious 24 year old who thinks he can be a tech lead like that guy's full of crap yeah and i mean even if you're like a precocious 30 year old staff engineer or ceo or cto like it really the range expands quite a bit as you get older. No one's going to care that you're a young CTO or whatever the new title is you have achieved by then, if you have. It won't matter as much. Yeah. All right. Question answered? I think so. What can people do if they would like their own questions answered? Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button. Thank you for everyone who

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