Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 475: Am I too loyal to my big tech job and politely preserving time

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi! I’m currently working for a big tech company and I’ve just accepted an internal transfer to another team. At the same time, an external company reached out, offering me a job for a role I’m interested in and twice my current compensation. I’m not sure what to do. The offer from the new company is very interesting and I wouldn’t think twice at accepting it if I still was in my old team. But now that I’ve accepted the internal transfer, I don’t know what’s best for my career: stay with my current company and lose out on a great offer, or go with the new company but likely burn bridges with my current manager, possibly closing off future opportunities to return to my current company (something that I’m open to in the future)? How do I politely but firmly stop a project manager colleague, who has vast open plains in their calendar compared to my Tetris-stacked week as a senior software engineer, from parking themselves at my desk for 45-minute vent sessions about everything that’s frustrating them about our project? It’s never just the weather; it’s a full-blown TED Talk on their annoyances, which makes me feel defensive and frustrated in return. I’ve tried the headphones-on-and-look-intently-at-the-screen-approach, and sitting on the other side of the office, booking a smaller meeting room to hide, and carrying on working as they tell me about their troubles with both leadership and members of my team. Nothing seems to work. They find me every time. Is there a way to escape without faking my own death or staging an office fire drill? Thanks!

it takes more than launching an agentic sync engine crypto miner startup to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 475 i am your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers who just love the buzz i think we should return to the hype of our ancestors and launch like a an internet shopping startup back back to the very roots based on ajax yeah the secret to our success is ajax yeah we're using this little known api in the browser called xml http request that has been ignored for years and we'll go back to like darpa and say we can make two computers talk to each other that's our startup we're going to create a message board powered by email yeah i like it

yeah that's that's like the that's like the return to a cabin in the woods to live a simpler life for software engineers like what if i just had to worry about email in 1975 it's just usenet forums and that's all you got yeah i'm sure there's horrors beyond our comprehension hiding in there too it just seems simpler i lived through some of those times and it was pretty good really the good old days did you ever run your own email server i did for about 15 years okay yeah i never did that i by the time i got around to learning what that even was all the advice was and never do this well that was the advice when i started to actually i started slightly before but it was terrible every year there was some new thing like oh now you got to do spf or every email

you send is going to get rejected yeah oh now you got to do gray listing oh now you got to do like anyways just so much and then spam you know i had like this spam assassin tool anyways oh every couple of months there was some email i would send and it wouldn't go through it was awful it was just awful but you learned i got really good at post fix configuration files and what's that one that started with a q i think i did that one for a while q mail no i can't remember that was probably that was a client i think i don't know anyways this is not why people listen here talk about old tech that we can't remember or that in my case i never knew dave should i thank our patrons i was hoping you would okay thank you to these people who contribute at

the level where we shout them out every single week thank you to hey i'm new here i wonder if this is being read before the miami sky never ending story pointer.com make agile gooder woke up this morning got myself a gabagool the two things security engineers hate are change and the way things are matthias my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging in the dark connie the mobile development ordinaire first of his name quote or one equals one drop table meow mix jacob shandling bjorn there's a very particular smell coming from your desk please create a spike to investigate nice the missing semicolon i feel like you could really mess people up if you just say like a single opening parenthesis and then you're just waiting the whole episode yeah for

the closer i feel imbalanced this whole show yeah all right back to the thank yous thank you to christy the world's okayest programmer noah labhart what's up soft skillet nation it's your boys j and d here to drop some dope wisdom if i ever say that in earnestness it is because a gun is being held to my head and so that's your signal to come rescue me from my hostage situation okay daniel remsburg alexander kuznetsov nick molyneux if the service org uses a subservice organ that controls that the subservice organ necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel oh jameson repeat after me here we go skibbity bop bop do bop buddha bop bop nice i feel like sometimes foreign languages i say more smoothly than i say whatever that is but i am the null pointer

dan from drone to play chase w norton never is not just to create on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver miamix miamix please deliver trash panda swiss python summit in october boredom detected in episode 466 sorry was on holidays nice kyle boss kensi dodds that guy over there jenny kim's the stochastic parrot quinton we have not heard from you in a month please go see susan in hr asap jonathan king's nigh beautiful functional user documentation the best lm says if you want to grow your business go to hormonesy.pro 20 a month is a very fair price for the joy i feel every week when jameson and dave read out loud my silly patreon name yeah someone tell will angel how to get the https redirect working for www.vibechart.net

will angel has the record for making me click on the most links in patreon donations totally really good fishing campaign will angel got me gets me every time it takes more than using my patreon field to finally have you read my intro suggestion to be a great engineer uh that's some patreon injection i guess braden canes john grant britney ellick and benadryl cabbage patch wimbledon tennis match thank you oh man this is a good week oh yeah it is a delight to read your names and if you want to be a part of the delight go to soft skills dot audio and click support us on patreon where any amount will get you an invite to our slack team and enough of an amount will get

you uh to have us read stuff arbitrary stuff that fits in the name field okay uh i had to go check out vibechart.net and uh it's a chart based on what you want to see instead of what is true and the the the featured chart is the gpt5 chart did you see some of that it's beautiful okay dave do you want to read our first question i do but first i want to tell you it's qmail what you were thinking of earlier and uh i did not use it but it was kind of like the self-proclaimed perfect email server with no bugs and no security problems or anything but no hardly anyone used it only only the purest email admins used it it's wild that that has i'm sure there are people who still run their own email servers actually i would love to hear from

you about why you do it and what it's like if you do but i feel like that has been subsumed into the the frothy seas of just invisible infrastructure oh yeah beneath all of our lived technology experiences which i guess are boats on top of these seas in this metaphor i didn't think it through i don't know but thinking about qmail as like a standalone concept that i have to think about it just doesn't exist for most most people that's true and thankfully it doesn't exist for me anymore either oh i'm so happy to not be an email admin anymore all right shall i read our first question please this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi i'm currently working for a big tech company and i've just accepted an internal transfer to another team at the same time an

external company reached out, offering me a job for a role I'm interested in, and twice my current compensation. I am not sure what to do. The offer from the new company is very interesting, and I wouldn't think twice at accepting it if I still was in my old team. But now that I've accepted the internal transfer, I don't know what's best for my career. Stay with my current company and lose out on a great offer? Or go with the new company but likely burn bridges with my current manager possibly closing off future opportunities to return to my current company something that i am open to in the future uh take the offer that was too easy how are we gonna get a whole episode out of this jameson well there's a bunch of nuance here that we don't know but if it's literally

twice the the compensation take the offer like if you tell your new boss hey i was really excited to work here and then i got an offer for literally twice as much money your boss would better say the same thing. Yeah. Your boss would say, well, I'd love you to stay. Maybe if we give you like a small $2 raise, I don't know. You might get a raise out of it, but if it's literally twice as much money, you're not going to burn a bridge by leaving. Or if you do burn a bridge, it's not a good bridge. It's a rickety bridge. That's right. It's a bridge you didn't want to walk over again anyway. And if you stay and your company and your team members know what you turned down, they might be like, I don't know what's wrong with this guy. Why did he stay?

yeah i mean yeah it's it's nice to stay a long time and build a reputation and build a career somewhere and there's yeah there's obviously risk to leaving and maybe it's a i don't know maybe it's a small startup where it'll implode in six months and you'll be back on the market like there's some caveats here the other caveat is if you are at a big tech job you potentially have some compensation in actual liquid equity and you might not be counting that if you aren't then i would definitely count it as a compensation difference if assuming you don't have that you're next job but if if it's literally twice as much money and everything else is i don't know pretty solid if it's not in a tech you hate or or yeah you're you're working for what's the bad guy in

gi joe is that the cobra commander i think so yeah if you if you're not like working for the bad guys in a children's movie i don't think you would burn any bridges at all i kind of think of i always think of hank scorpio in the simpsons who employed homer for a while yeah yeah yeah he's like a great boss super nice like great friend yeah also like super villain yeah homer went to resign and he was like homer's like i just can't work here anymore totally clueless that he's actually working for a super villain he's like all right homer well hey it was great working with you on your way out could you pick up a gun and shoot some of these people that are fighting he's like okay yeah so can i tell my internal transfer story where this the opposite

it happen to me the other direction i was the on the other end of this please yeah after a year into my big tech co experience which was a great experience i loved it i decided to switch teams and i kind of put out the feelers a little bit and one particular team recruited me pretty heavily and one thing that was appealing about this team is that the director who at these big tech companies the director is a kind of a big deal you can imagine that they usually have like 100 people reporting to them and they probably make close to a million dollars a year like that's just to kind of just to give you a sense for the scope of the scope of that role the director himself asked me to report to him and i thought this could be a really cool opportunity directors

are they have much more influence on promotion and promotion is a huge part of the culture there for making more money so i'm like i'll take it so i go over i take the job and literally the next day my director resigned and took a job at spotify and um i'm just like uh what happened i could tell he felt really bad yeah and so he actually sat down with me it's like hey dave sorry for the hard sell i uh just really had to take this job and i'm like okay man well whatever i guess see you like what are you gonna do like i guess that's why he's a director because he can do the hard sell knowing and i've just i'm out here there's no way you're gonna report to me i'm out here exactly hey want to report to a director wink

wink so i didn't end up reporting to that director for more than about 24 hours i did eventually report to another director which is also a great experience but the point is did i hold it against this person did this person burn a bridge would i work for this person again and the answer to all of those questions is the good answer meaning i was waiting for how you're going to resolve yeah i realized yes wait no yes no yes no i don't remember the order it was no i don't feel like they burned a bridge yes i would work for them again was i really upset no so it was fine and i think if you do the same thing you're even more justified especially if you tell the person look this isn't about you this fell in my

lap at a really bad timing but i feel like i have to take this opportunity it's such a big win for me financially i'll tell you a line someone used on me once they said i feel like i would be financially irresponsible not to take this offer and i was like oh can't argue against that one yeah if it's just take new job for twice the comp or stay here i think it's i'm still pretty clear yes take the job you should think about the possibility that you will bring it up to your current manager and is there a a number at which you would stay at your current job that is less than 2x because i'm just going to assume that that's not realistic but is there some discount off of the new offer that uh would make you feel okay about staying and okay about giving up the

extra comp because there's some benefit to staying at this company that you know already and this new team you're excited about and that might not be an option at all it might not come up you could bring it up too that's a little bit tricky because i don't know presumably they want you on the team because you're there and maybe you got recruited over or i don't usually the internal transfer has to be approved in some way by the the new manager but i think it's worth at least thinking do i want to try to negotiate for more comp here so that I can stay? Yeah, that's a good question. And unlikely that you'll be able to match, but maybe you'll get close enough that you feel okay about it. Yeah, I would start by thinking, well, what's the number at which I would stay here? And then

maybe I can go have that conversation. Instead of just saying, see, I'm out, say, I have this offer. I would be open to staying if it was less financially ruinous for me to reject this offer. And I think if you go to each person individually and let them hear your voice and feel your emotional state, let's call it, and talk to each of them, you can completely prevent the bridge from being burned. Oh, you mean each of your team members? Yeah, like each of your,

so your former team you probably want to go to, your former manager you probably want to go to. I'm assuming you just left that team just like a few weeks ago. And then your current team and manager, I would go to each of them individually and just tell them your story from your perspective. Do not give their creative little brains

an opportunity to invent a malicious narrative and ascribe it to you. Instead, put the narrative in their mind by telling them, look, I had no intention of doing this. I love this team. I love working with you. I was super excited to be on this team with you.

But this opportunity fell in my lap just out of the blue. And I feel like I can't miss this. I have to take it. And I think with that in mind, that guaranteed any reasonable person is going to think, if I were in this person's shoes, I'd do the same thing. Yeah. And they might be disappointed

because they might have wished that you still worked with them. But that's fine. I don't think your goal is to make them agree with you and say, i'm glad you're not going to work with us anymore but i think it is reasonable to give them give them an explanation that you feel like leaves the relationship open maybe they still will get mad and say well screw you i never want to talk to i would never talk to someone that would ever work anywhere else yeah and then good news you were going to burn that bridge eventually unless you died at that job so exactly i guess it's like well there's burning the bridge and then there's like

leaving at a time that makes sense. And I think here, the thing that is really getting under this listener's skin is the fact that they just transferred into this new team. And it looks just weird, right? But it's not weird if you tell the story fully. Yeah. Well, did we answer the question? I think so. It's really straightforward to me. And I think to Jameson, in fact, the moment you answered, just quit and take the job, I was like, yep, that's what I was going to say too. It's a no brainer. Look at that. We managed to wring an extra 10 minutes out of that question, despite it being answered that's like that should be our tagline for our whole podcast squeezing 30 minutes out of questions that could be answered in three you know they pay us the big

bucks for the filibustering not for the quick answers paid by the minute yeah you know how it costs money for our listeners to listen to this show and that's how they demonstrate how valuable we are that's why no okay i see if people are paying by the minute yeah the rate is zero dollars per minute but they still pay by the minute that's yeah that's fair no they actually they pay with the opportunity cost of other things they should they could i i did say should i did not mean that they could be doing with their time which is valuable we appreciate it yes dave should i read our next question yes but i will note that opportunity cost revenue does not pay the bills around here that's true yeah i cannot go pay my mortgage with opportunity cost but i surely will

be able to pay it with the wisdom i'll gain from reading this question let's do it i'm going to do that now this is from an anonymous listener who says how do i politely but firmly stop a project manager colleague who has a vast open plane in their calendar compared to my tetra stacked week as a senior software engineer nice from parking themselves at my desk for a 45 minute vent session about everything that's frustrating them about our project it's never just the weather it's a full-blown ted talk on their annoyances which makes me feel very defensive and frustrated in return i've tried the headphones on and look intently at the screen approach and sitting on the other side of the office booking a smaller meeting room to hide and carrying on working as

they tell me about their troubles with both leadership and members of my team nothing seems to work they find me every time it's like a horror movie yes kick the door down with the chainsaw except instead of the chainsaw revving it's like you'll never believe what this person just said oh is there a way to escape without faking my own death or staging an office fire drill thanks office fire drill yes okay first answer go to all of the uh what are those called fire alarm things on the walls that you can pull to trigger the fire alarm and replace the sign that says fire alarm with a sign that says in case of 45 minute vent session from project manager name here pull this handle they'll get the message yeah you need a button to trigger it remotely

though because if you're if you're worried about offending them by saying i have a lot of work to do you're probably also worried by about offending them by standing up and walking over to the fire alarm and pulling it yeah since clearly that this listener's whole strategy is avoid direct confrontation at all costs that would be a pretty clear message though like imagine you're in a meeting and one of the attendees you're running the meeting one of the attendees just walks over to the fire alarm and pulls it. This meeting is over. That is some very clear feedback

on their opinion of the meeting. I am so like unperceptive of subtlety that I would still question. I'd be like, why did they pull that fire alarm? Surely it couldn't have been my 45 minute monologue. They're so safety conscious and I appreciate that about them. Oh my goodness.

I have so many questions here. Why does your project manager have vast open planes in their calendar yeah what's up with that i feel like a big part of their job is like meeting with people to gather context and status and share it around like what it sounds like they are not super engaged in their job which i guess is also evident well clearly yeah they got 45 minutes all the time and complaining about everything look i think james and i think you just found the answer here's what you do look i i'm going to avoid giving a direct strategy at all costs i'm going to go indirect only so start with the fire alarm but

option two is go to everyone that this person should be meeting with regularly and ask them to invite the project manager to calendar events on their calendar and just fill that thing up ah okay like don't you think you should be having a semi-weekly status meeting with the engineering architect team bam there's another 45 minute session free of venting exactly i had a sort of kind of similar experience i was i think a sophomore in college and i had this off-campus job at a company that hired software engineers but also dangled the promise of hiring students that would they would then get to do software engineering they never did they just put them in like sales or customer support or whatever so anyways i was working this company

they had a long tenured senior engineer who was not great at social cues in general kind of frightened me i felt like he was always mad at me and thought i was a moron but also every day at the end of the work day he would just at 4 30 right on the dot would just like walk into the office and start talking to me okay never talked to me ever outside of this except like to tell me that i was dumb and wrong about stuff what like look are you serious i might be there might be a little bit of hyperbole here but we did not talk ever about non-work things and our work interactions were generally i left them with my tender heart bruised but for some reason he just decided like i can't go home yet but i'm done working i will go talk to jameson and it was kind of like this

he just said words at me for a long time and then left and i solved it by working there for like nine months and then quitting never ever addressing it directly in any way but it did suck a lot i don't know why he did it i feel like if i were approaching it with my grown-up big boy pants that i wear today as a bigger boy i think i would be more willing to say hey i have this stuff i have to get done i'm gonna go get it done now you know like i don't know i don't think there's a way to do this without saying i need you to stop talking to me which is awkward to say to someone but maybe you can shortcut it by giving them work to do to address the problems they bring up they're super annoyed they're mad about the project about your colleagues they they say what they're annoyed

about in minute one you say you should go talk to person x about it because i have a lot of work to do and then good idea maybe that frees you up you kind of judo use their own frustration weight against them kind of fling them over your shoulder at this next person it does sound like this is not a great colleague though in general yeah it's kind of the message i'm getting too like this is the job you work with all these people on leadership people on the team if you're mad about all of them then i mean this is okay this is another way to solve it which is like like in the parent trap the kids break up the marriage that they don't want you you just go like plant the seed to get this guy fired because you don't like the 45 minute vent sessions just casually drop like oh

sorry you're on stand-up in the morning right you're like oh i didn't finish that because project manager showed up 3 15 p.m yesterday you know what that means yeah i wouldn't recommend that that's passive aggressive it does feel passive aggressive and harsh and sneaky but i i don't think there's a way around this besides saying i can see you're really frustrated i do have a lot of stuff i have to get done right now so it's not a good time for me to talk yeah and that's that's easier to pull off than trying to address the systematic problem where you sit down and say hey you have a habit of coming in here and taking my work time away and venting about your frustrations with this team and project you know instead just saying like in

this moment i've got this pressing deadline can i get to it yeah so are you saying you can't just keep doing that forever well no what i'm saying is i promise not to confront this problem directly so i'm giving more options to let this problem continue ah okay so keep doing this forever Exactly. I mean, this feels like the kind of thing you talk about at lunch every once in a while, right? Like you're going to lunch with your work colleagues and you talk about stuff that isn't work sometimes, I swear. But also sometimes you talk about work-related but not like get-the-work-done discussions. Yeah, but it's never super productive.

I mean, here, I heard a great definition once of, I mean, they define this as gossip, which is essentially what this is. and some people think of gossip as like a harmless entertaining activity that people talk about but gossip can actually be really harmful here I mean there's some acute harm that's maybe not the big deal which is you've lost 45 minutes every few days got it so you lost some productivity but the real harm here is this person is talking about problems with the team and project with someone who can't solve the problems so it's like look you don't actually care about any of this you just care about how you feel about it so freaking go talk to the people who can actually make a difference and fix it otherwise you're just whining and not actually you don't actually

care about this team and project being successful so i don't know i might be tempted now i'm going to really just directly confront this thing but i might i might be tempted to say it i was about to say yeah that's remarkably direct dave it's kind of violating my tenant but i might be willing if the circumstances are right to say hey you you kind of seem like you don't care about this project you know just let that hit them between the eyes and let it sit for a minute and they might be like what what what they'll probably act confused if they aren't genuinely confused and then you could say you spend a lot of time talking about what's wrong with this project but you're talking to people like me who can't actually fix the things you're talking about

Maybe you should talk to people who, you know, if you really care about the project, I would encourage you to talk to people who can. And this will probably be received with a very cold reception. They might hate you, but it will probably stop the venting sessions. Yeah, there is a tension here between getting this person to leave you alone and having a close, cordial working relationship. Right. Just from reading the question, I assume it's not just this awesome, it's not a great time all of the time except these sessions. but maybe it is maybe it's important that you work really well with this person and that would probably get harder in most of the most of the scenarios where you say please stop this is

horrible to get them to stop probably going to intensify their grumpies yeah exactly i think there is a mastery level here where you can give someone this feedback from a place of care rather than just from a place of i don't you're annoying to me and i want the annoyance to stop because there really is a problem like this person has a problem they are wasting your time complaining about things that you can't fix on a project that they are responsible for the success of like nothing in there says i'm i'm someone who takes ownership and accountability no it's not there and they need that or else their career is going to suck so as a favor to them if you could really treat it this way and say look i'm worried about how you talk about this project it makes it

seem like you don't care about it and i think you do but i don't whether true or not i don't think you want people to believe you don't care you know there's a hundred ways this goes wrong but there's one way it goes right where you make someone realize they've been doing something that's harmful to themselves i like that framing of i'm not just here to make the annoying thing go away i'm trying to help help you resolve this underlying situation which they do not sound happy right yeah they're mad about leadership and members of the team and and maybe they're even justified but here's my final thought for everyone i guess now i'm going to speak to people who are the project manager who find themselves complaining vocally and frequently to their team members

find someone a trusted confidant outside of work that you can vent to everyone needs to vent i need to vent. I'm sure, Jameson, you've vented about me to other people. The point is, everyone needs to do it, but you've got to find the right outlet because this is just harmful. So find someone. Maybe you have a special plus one in your life. Maybe you've got a trusted friend. Maybe you've got someone who knows none of these people at work, doesn't know anything about the internal workings of this company, who you can talk to, and they can listen and help you get all that off your chest and i promise you it feels better it really does but when you do this you're just planting poison in your team members and might make you feel better temporarily but it's harmful

for your career it's harmful for them and it's wasting time and it creates bad culture i don't know if it would even make you feel better i feel like you might feel i mean it's nice to feel like someone's on your side right if you complain to the right person they say oh yeah of course i agree with all your complaints this is horrible and you're sort of not alone in it but yeah it's a lot easier you can you can get a lot of complaining done in the time it takes to solve a problem right you could you could have the same 45 minute vent session for six months because it might take six months to solve an underlying problem of like an executive who does not believe in the team because of justifiable reasons and that's frustrating to you so i think that's also part of the danger here

is not just that it makes everybody feel bad but that it can feel like nothing is ever changing because if you complain every week it's going to be pretty close to the same most every week because sometimes this stuff takes a long time to change so it can also just it can be harder to stick with the long slog of work required to make hard changes if you're every week you get this snapshot where it's basically the same as last week and it still sucks does that make sense yeah totally and it's so tempting to do this with your co-workers because they understand it you know it's like a shared lived suffering yeah well speaking of shared lived suffering have we answered this question i think so good luck and i would love to hear back from you

through the same question form about whether you decided to confront this thing head-on and try your hand at giving someone this strong feedback that they're doing something harmful for themselves without yourself seeming like you're just being complaining and negative oh that would be so great. I know a few people who could do this and have done this. And I just, I'm in big admiration of these people, but they're pretty rare. Yeah. I'm not one of these people. I think there's like a gravitas you need to pull this off well, to communicate both, hey, stop it. And also I care about you a lot. Right. Oh, let me ask. I'll throw one more thing in there to help maybe make that conversation go well. There's something that I hear in, I guess this is from the therapy

community i don't know maybe it's more just like counseling in general but it's every time you ask someone to do something or you need to tell someone something that might be hard for them to hear it's called permission based and i don't know if you've heard this phrase jameson but basically like when you hear like someone call in on like a talk show radio show where they're asking like kind of like therapy style questions the host will sometimes be like hey can i just be really direct with you you know or can i be like brutally honest and a lot of times the other person will be like yeah and it's almost like of course they're like look i called you so yeah i want you to be honest but hey they walked into your office so exactly but the point the point is

that even though obviously logically the host of the of the talk show clearly was called by the caller because the caller wants their honest opinion it's like can i be honest with you no i'd rather you lie to me right like no that was never going to be the answer but for some reason And the act of asking that question, hey, can I be really honest with you right now? Especially if you say it in a tone that's kind of neutral and not, hey, can I just be honest with you right now? You know, it's not like that. It's more like, hey, can I be really direct with you for a moment? When they say yes, and you can kind of read how they're going to take it.

But if they say yes and they seem eager, it completely changes the mindset with which people receive hard to hear information. Now, in this case, they didn't come to you looking for information. You probably have to work up to the, can I be honest with you? And there might be no good way to deliver this information so that they are just in love with you. But you can soften it a little bit with permission-based questions. Dave, can I be honest with you? I'd rather you not.

Okay, yes. That really destroys my next point because I was going to say, I love this advice. But now you're like, well, what was he going to say if he was going to be honest? He's lying to me saying he loves this advice. If you say, can I be honest with you, and I say yes, and you say I love the device, it's like the compliment sinks three levels deeper into the foundation of my soul. Oh, good. Well, yeah, I like this.

I haven't heard about this before, but I'm going to think about it. Permission-based. Cool. I'm glad you added that. I was ready to move on, but that felt worthwhile. I got to throw in my own thing, too, to try and one-up Dave, which is you tried your headphones in. You need to play music out loud very loudly so that you cannot hear them, and they can

tell like they can't hear also because if you just have headphones on yeah it's sort of a signal but they can still hear themselves talk go get one of those giant gaudy bluetooth speakers that has like flashing lights all over it too that'll do the job yeah and then you have some fun you've got music choices to play with as a little lever you can turn to try and add another layer of signaling yeah i love it all right dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can find our little form where you can fill out the information and ask us a question. Every time someone submits that form, I feel like they're saying, David Jamison, can I be honest with you? And we're just like,

absolutely. I thought you were going to say an angel gets its wings type of thing. Every time you submit that form, a program compiles successfully. Exactly. Every time you submit that form, an AI agent actually writes the correct code. Yeah. Yeah. CI build passes. the the the end-to-end tests pass without flakiness thank you for listening we will catch you next week