Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 479: Contractors to the rescue and dinged for delay

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hey skillet nation, long time skilletee first time skilleter here. I started at a scale up about 6 months ago and recently, I was asked to help with a project that was greatly behind schedule. The folks responsible for the original system are no longer at the company, and the team currently attempting to get it over the finish line have struggled greatly. The codebase is full of performance issues and the infrastructure was not set up to scale. Basically things are bad. Since joining, I’ve helped draft a plan to fix most of the performance issues, and then incrementally improve the architecture. Things are going great, except for the fact that we’re 6 weeks out from our deadline with a burnt out dev team. To resolve this, our CTO hast started to rapidly hire contractors to “help out”. As one might expect, this has only slowed us down. But our CTO, lacking trust in the previous team, has found the promises of the contractors very alluring. I, on the other hand, don’t love the idea of building this greenfield system with temporary workers and then dropping it on an already burnt out team to maintain. Am I overreacting? How would yall handle this scenario? How can I convince our CTO that “the mythical man month” still applies here, regardless of what the contracting company says? Listener k pop demon hunters asks, Hello! I’m a senior engineer in a big tech company. I recently got a bad annual review from my manager due to the fact that I caused a delay happened in my last project. It was a compliance process involving multiple stakeholders and one of them didn’t give me an immediate approval for the step they owned. I promptly updated my submission for review after I got the initial feedback, pinged them in a messenger and sent a reminder mail every day until I got an approval from them. I feel absurd that I got a bad review due to the delay of external process. What could I have done this better? Thanks for the great show. It’s making my commute more enjoyable. Keep it up!

it takes more than changing your zoom name to ai note taker to be admitted into any zoom meeting to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 479 i am your host dave smith i am the ai note taker for this zoom meeting pay me no mind as i record your words for eternity just kidding i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for ai note takers all around the world who want to improve their ai note taking skills we talked about ai etiquette a little bit last week and i feel like this is another thing where it would be weird if someone just added a random human to a meeting and no one acknowledged it no one said this is who they are this is what they're here for but i've been in meetings where there's

just and meetings that i ostensibly control or have some influence over and someone just like pops in some rando it's some startup it's not even like the zoom ai meeting bot it's the some random companies one yeah and no one batted an eye and i i had to say why is this here recording my words forever and what i can't i can't even see the output of it you're not allowed to oppose ai james and you're going to be seen as a luddite well this is my attempt to codify that it is rude to add an ai meeting bot to a meeting especially one that you do not organize in control yeah and not say to the attendees hey here's why this is here and here's how you can access what it is recording that you say or whatever how how am i to know that it's not the the nazi ai meeting bot

that just changes everything i say to be a strong like advocation for the policies of of the national socialist party i don't want that i don't really want that opt out yeah somebody's funding that startup but i don't want to be associated with them so it's rude yeah don't be rude be polite introduce your meeting attendees honestly some of these things are extremely viral they find somehow they find ways to get infected into other people's zoom meetings and i've been on meetings where those things join and the meeting organizer is like i don't know what that is yeah viral i mean it could be literally it could be there is a virus on their computer that has infected zoom to make it add people or add

entities dave should i thank our patrons i think you should okay these you know if they're agents they have enough good taste to spend money on on the patreon on the patreon so we'll accept it yeah thank you to these folks who contribute to the level that we shout them out every week thank you to engineering leadership summit october 24th i think we need a policy for using this for advertisement because i'm starting to feel weird about this all right an open space event register at yale summit.com okay let's normalize calling curly braces squiggly braces even though they're pretty curly not so squiggly never-ending story pointer.com has too many words i the letter c nice i can't type anymore i think that's what it says autocomplete woke up this morning

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to all of us yes daniel remsburg nick molyneux if the service org uses a subservice org and the controls of the service org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel aeroplane baggage catch a single open parenthesis Dan from drone deploy never is not just a crater on Mars flamingo emoji I like chicken I like liver meomics meomics please deliver trash panda Swiss Python summit every October

got to keep the patreon name latency resilient Kyle boss can't see dogs that guy over there Jenny Kim the stochastic parrot Quinton we have not heard from you in a month please go see Susan in HR ASAP Jonathan King is an I beautiful functional user documentation never is not just a crater on Mars teddy bear

emoji someone tell will angel how to get the https redirect working for vibe chart.net actually this is an unexplored besides will will's an innovator here stack overflow is probably dead right killed by llms what if you used the patreon name field and subscribe to the soft skills engineering podcast and then use that for your technical support yeah it's a group of listeners who who are wise and have good taste so i bet they could answer your questions yeah i think it i don't know anything that could go wrong with that i don't know anything that could be a better use of your money and your time soft wars episode one the phantom manager brayden canes john grant britney ellick benadryl cabbage patch wimbledon tennis match yes thank you thank you all i can't

even remember that actor's real name now maybe he can't either something with cabbage patch i'm pretty sure yeah there's a b and a c and he's british um if you want to join this group you can go to soft skills the audio and click support us on patreon any amount gets you an invite to our slack team and any amount of enough dollars or your local currency gets you a weekly shout out and our eternal undying gratitude and dave will you read our first question i will this comes from an anonymous listener who says hey skillet nation long time skillety first time skilleter i started at a scale up about six months ago and recently i was asked to help with a project that was greatly behind schedule the folks responsible for the original system are no

longer at the company and the team currently attempting to get it over the finish line have struggled greatly the code base is full of performance issues and the infrastructure was not set up to scale basically things are bad since joining i've helped draft a plan to fix most of the performance issues and then incrementally improve the architecture things are going great except for the fact that we're six weeks out from our deadline with a burnt out dev team things are going great to resolve this our cto has started to rapidly hire contractors to quote help out as one might expect this has only slowed us down but our cto lacking trust in the previous This team has found the promises of the contractors very alluring.

I, on the other hand, don't love the idea of building this greenfield system with temporary workers and then dropping it on an already burnt out team to maintain. Am I overreacting? How would you handle this scenario? How can I convince our CTO that, quote, that the mythical man month still applies here regardless of what the contracting company says? I love that the mythical man month is still a thing in common reference. I feel like there's a lot of kind of esoteric early computer science stuff floating around. But this one is pretty mainstream. But I should probably define it.

Actually, I should ask Dave to define it. Yeah, I should define it. But first, I have to say, we are currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first edition publication of this book. Oh, nice. What a great year to bring this up. 50 years. man name any book published 50 years ago that's still relevant to software development probably like kafka's the trial it's maybe a good one war and peace these were software they were actually

software development books no one realized they were just trojan horses lots of russian literature about like the agony of existence is probably relevant everything tolstoy ever wrote yeah yeah the brothers karamazov yeah uh if you ever want to like murder your manager yeah mythical man month all right what is it i think the only thing you need to know you can actually just so i might be wrong about this james because i've actually never read the mythical man month i've been hiring people to read it for me but every every time i add someone to the book reading team it slows down the deadline so i've not gotten through it yet but i believe the the basic thing you need to know from this book is adding more engineers

to a late engineering project makes it later yep yeah i think that's it there's also something about like nine women can't make a baby in one month or something is that is that in this book i think it's in the book yeah i'm sure it's not the origin of it but yeah adding manpower to a late software project makes it later is what i see on the wiki page wikipedia page okay i can pretend like is what i remembered off the top of my head there's also a lot of other stuff in this book that feels very dated he talks a lot about os 360 which is this ibm like i think machine operating system i think this is when they were like the same thing almost i don't know and talks about like surgeons and assistants and actually maybe it's not as dated wow with lms maybe i

should read this again but yeah there's this idea that a project has a certain number of people hours in it and if you add more people they will do more hours of work and thus the project will move closer to completion and the mythical man month is basically saying no there's there's overhead to adding people they have to learn stuff they have to communicate they can get stuff wrong and then slow down other people and yeah yeah and i think that one of the probably a way to say this to a technical person like a cto is to say have you ever heard of the traveling salesperson problem yes because that's essentially what i mean a very similar concept is at play i think when you add people to a project because every node added to the graph where node here represents a person

introduces n minus one communication channels potentially and so you know you have two you have one person working on a project they don't need to communicate with anyone but themselves you know so they're going to go as fast as they can add a second person and now you have communication overhead, where person A can't really make some decisions without consulting person B, unless the work is very clearly delineated between the two people, in which case that requires a bunch of communication to delineate. And then person three adds two communication paths. Person four, now you have... Anyway, it gets out of control. I think it's like a two to the end problem. Yeah, that's kind of the core thing here. I actually think that

contractors were the original vibe coding oh because you get a bunch of things you can tell them information you can kind of set them off to go do stuff you sort of have to check up on them and and have some way to verify it and integrate their work but you're not doing it all by yourself theoretically it seems like it can scale really well sounds sounds great and then you show up on twitter for someone being able to like harvest all the private data with a simple get request to your api because because it got it got contractor coded or vibe coded yeah that's a really good point contractor code and llm code yep so the only difference is the cost and the speed yeah they're way more expensive which one is way more expensive contractors yes

and way slower yeah so if the outcome is the same why not just dispatch an entire army of llm powered agents i mean that sounds worse in a in a or bad in a different way but there is there is another big difference though llm agents will not just stop working and schedule a meeting with you for three days out and then spend an hour with you talking about it right they will just work yeah they will just write that's true yeah they will not raise their hand and say hey what about this thing and hopefully good contractors are doing that some of them do that right some of the agents will actually pause and be like you know how does this look but yeah well i guess the point i'm trying to make is they will not fill your calendar with calendar events oh you're saying

that's a plus okay yeah it's a good thing like a contractor is going to come in they're going to work slow slower than an lm maybe but i will say the contractors will good ones will probably produce better results because they communicate with you and they'll fill your calendar with discussions necessary they will also develop context about what they're building which is a thing yes lms cannot do on their own so i guess there's some parallels here but that's not a solution what do you do about this case where you're you're getting contractors dumped on you and you don't want to yeah i mean it's actually a really hard case to make to convince someone that adding people to a project is going to make it later it's just such a compelling proposition

And it feels impossible, right? Because at some point, you can see how you would get more done with a bigger team. And so I suppose that means there's some point, that's why this is specifically about a late project. It's not about productivity overall. It's if you dump a bunch of people into a failing late project, it's not going to fix it. But you do hopefully go faster and get more done overall as your team grows. it's just that's not what you're that's not what you're doing here you are dumping people on this project maybe you could advocate for hiring and then at least it's not gonna you're still gonna be subject to the mythical man month problem but

you will have a team with more capacity and fresh blood to help with the burnout maybe you can see someone with the light in their eyes still and say I remember when I was like you when I had hope and sleep and could deliver stuff i think there's two real answers to a project being late which are to

cut scope or push the deadline out i think that's literally the only thing you can do if something is late and you're gonna do one of those things you're just gonna do it with contractors in the mix also i i think the chance is is very small that dumping all these contractors on will ship the project and if they do ship the project the chance is even smaller that it'll not be a disaster to maintain afterwards that'll that'll cost more than it was worth maybe what you could do is if your cto is doing this presumably there's some business need beyond we just want stuff done faster because faster is better and we learn more and we make more money faster etc like is there an external deadline you are trying to hit try to understand why they are

pushing for this specific deadline sometimes deadlines are also motivational tools or planning tools and in that case if the deadline is a tool for encouraging focus on the team you need to then focus by cutting scope if you just burn out and add more people it didn't work if the deadline was a tool to make sure hey we're staying focused on delivering stuff the right stuff to the customer we know we don't know everything up front so plans are tricky to get right exactly on timelines but we believe by saying we will ship by this date as we approach that date it will clarify questions about what should be or should not be delivered by that date and we should pull stuff out that doesn't matter make decisions to help us hit that date and it

seems like that part might not be happening yeah that's a really good point it's almost like you maybe aren't taking advantage of the schedule pressure to make more focused decisions on what needs to be in scope yeah i believe there's probably maybe there's some chance that the schedule pressure is is also well i just hope they work extra hard maybe they work extra hours or extra long i don't think that's the useful part of it often i think it's it's more about the focus you're not gonna hopefully you'll be less likely to go down rabbit holes or or gold plate a thing that people don't touch or doesn't matter if you have this deadline hanging over you to say well we have to deliver all this customer value is this going to help me deliver this customer value by

this time and i'm talking to you but i think you need to talk to your cto about this to say hey we've got this deadline looming. I'm worried we're not going to hit it with the scope that we currently have. Can we reduce any scope? If the deadline, help me understand why the deadline's important. If the exact date is important, let's make a plan for what we should focus on most by this date, because I don't think we're going to hit it. I think that makes a lot of sense. And one technique you can use to have that conversation be productive is you can say, I think we should rank the feature set in order of most importance on top and then estimate how much time we think each portion will take and then draw a line at six weeks out because that's

when the deadline is coming and say, is this acceptable or no? And then at six weeks, it's unlikely that you can actually do any hiring or contracting to materially move that date because of ramp up time and hiring time and overhead and getting new people on the team and so at this point you really don't if six weeks really is the date you don't have any other options except scope yeah yeah just just bear down and i don't know i'll buy everybody pizzas for six weeks i mean actually that that might help if there's some kind of war room of if if the deadline really is essential and they feel like the scope is all essential i would say rather than bringing a bunch of contractors maybe invest more in the existing team and figure out how can we fight the burnout

how can we focus them often burnout comes from feeling like the work you're doing doesn't matter or you're just marching you're grinding for nothing yeah and maybe you kind of get everybody in a room for a for a month and say this is important and and we will pay for flights and travel for remote or yeah maybe we're we're in the war room people love war rooms and there's a different vibe to unite and focus efforts instead of just say everyone please just work as hard as you can yes no harder please please harder than that yeah i i think what you one thing you said about burnout is critical which is burnout does not come from working hard burnout comes from pointless suffering like i don't know if you ask a team who just won the super bowl

like hey oh man how are you guys feeling they're not going to be like oh we worked so hard you know they're gonna be like we just won the super bowl this is awesome like it all they almost don't care how much hard work they had to put in all the hours and the labor and the laborious like constant practicing and working they're all super injured like yeah they're all hurt for sure yeah also hurt but they're happy but they're happy they're not burned out they're thrilled yeah and so i think the worst thing that can happen here is that you drive this team to work hard hard hard and then at the end it's just a flop you know and i gotta tell you this project has it smells like from this write-up that it's going to be a flop you know you've already missed lots of deadlines

the original team is all gone and i don't know this just tells me like i'm worried that you go this long without shipping something and then you ship this giant thing and you expect it to be a runaway success it's probably not going to be and i would manage that by incrementally releasing stuff as as you can as feasible to get feedback to make sure you're on the right track because i've seen teams do this where they just work work work work work and they ship something and it flops and now you get burnout you know like leading up to it you might be able to pep talk them you know it's like all right keep going we're almost there it's going to be so great and then you ship it it's like boom now we're all demotivated yeah yeah that's fair well say that

say that to your cto yeah go say it go say it have we answered the question i think so good luck best of luck to you dave should i read our next question yes i i was really hoping you would with all my heart okay i aim to please this is from a listener named k-pop demon hunters which is i i believe the new frozen i think i have children who've watched this 30 plus times and it's i'll leave it up to you whether that means i'm a bad parent or it's a really good movie or some kind of mixture yeah it could be both yeah my my three-year-old has some of these songs memorized he loves it i'll tell you i got okay as long as we're commenting on pop culture i'll just say i went to the movie theater last week and our movie got out it was not k-pop demon hunters but i

walked out of the movie theater and down the hall from me a literal explosion of 10 to 12 year old girls exploded out of a movie theater with cheers and screaming and dancing and yelling and and one of them walked by and i said hey what movie did you just come out of she said k-pop demon hunters it's it's really good i'll reveal personal details about my wife which she loves she's been into korean dramas and k-pop for for a while before it was cool and so she's struggling with the the mainstream recognition of this thing that she's liked for a long time and torn between oh it's great that like it's not weird anymore and also but everyone needs to acknowledge i was here first and they owe me a percentage of all the fun that they have with this fun royalties yeah her

her siblings used to make fun of her and now they bring it up and she's like you that's great you gotta bring me cookies as tribute for this hypocrisy nice all right i'll actually read the question now hello i'm a senior engineer at a big tech company i recently got a bad bad annual review from my manager due to the fact that i caused a delay in my last project it was a compliance process involving multiple stakeholders and one of them didn't give me an immediate approval for the step they owned i promptly updated my submission for review after i got the initial feedback pinged them in a message and sent a reminder email every day until i got an approval from them i feel absurd that i got a bad review due to the delay of

external processes what could i have done better thanks for the great show it's making my commute more enjoyable keep it up nice oh compliance process yeah i if i hear compliance i think delay that is pretty much yeah they're the same thing yeah and multiple stakeholders i also think delay i'm experiencing a similar thing without the bad performance review i mean maybe it's happening in my boss's head i just haven't heard yet but yeah there's there's some delays in our compliance process i who among us hasn't had that so you feel like you did what you're supposed to yeah and and i'm reading here i'm like you did a lot of stuff you updated your submission for review immediately you you pinged the person every day and sent a reminder email every day

i mean what more this is awesome i wish i had team members this proactive on this stuff i want to yeah i agree you did good work here you did not slack off on this it kind of sucks you got a bad review for it. On the other hand, you could look at this, maybe you were, if you were responsible for this compliance process, not just involved in it, if you're the one responsible for delivering its success, you did reasonable steps to work through it and it still was late. And maybe a thing you could have asked is, well, what else could I have done? If you emailed them every day for like three weeks, maybe after week one, you could have recognized, hey, emails don't seem to be working. It didn't work. I've pinged them a bunch of times. What else can I do? And I'm not

necessarily saying this performance review is reasonable. I guess I'm trying to take that perspective and say, well, the outcome was bad. It was slow. And you can point at stuff you did and say, look at the good things I did. And the review is soullessly staring down at you, snoodily down his nose saying, I don't care. The outcome was bad. It was still late. so if you if you go back in time what else could you have done because you've gone to their office maybe they're remote but you you drive over there i don't know mail them cookies or mail them a stink bomb depending on whether you're trying to use the carrot or the stick mail them a carrot or a stick this is a metaphor for what i need right now yeah mail them both and say you choose

yeah the carrot or the stick and based on what they mail back to you you then bust out something else yeah talk talk to their boss right uh i'm i'm working on this thing it's held up by this person can you nudge them i know they have a lot of priorities but this is super important to me i i think in the moment it is easy to look at this and i'm sure you had a million other things going on too right which is part of this it was probably not your whole job to babysit this process yeah but it might be a useful exercise to think like what if it was what if i could spend all of my time and resources on this what else could i have done and then maybe you can work backwards from that to well here's something that was maybe reasonable not not not an outrageous

amount of time or effort that maybe maybe i could have done something else i i want to say that i am very sensitive to getting a performance review that feels unfair because this happened to me once and i almost lost my mind but i won't tell that story yet first i want to say what you could have failed at here is that you didn't manage up well and it could just very well end up being that your manager did not understand what you were doing and why what you were doing was as good as could possibly be expected in real time. This is a very common problem among engineers where you think your manager knows more than they do about the work that you do. And I just want to say, I'm going to go on record and say, almost everyone listening to this probably has an inflated idea

of what your manager actually understands about your day-to-day work. And so it's almost always a good idea to make sure that your manager is an informed partner in the work that you're doing. And I love how proactive this person was during this process, sending all these messages and daily follow-up with the person. But I'm thinking, did you do the same with your manager so that your manager can feel like they're rowing with you and fully up to speed? imagine a daily message saying i just want you to know i have not taken my eye off this ball i will see this process through here's what i've done here's what i'm going to do if you have any other ideas i'm open to them you know and now your manager implicitly got a little skin in the game

because you opened up the solution space to their ideas and they can see that you are identifying and proactively solving this problem in real time i love that because earlier i mentioned maybe go to this person's manager it's often much more effective if if your boss goes to their boss oh yeah and by telling your boss here's what's happening it might bring them in like you said and and they could agitate a little bit yeah if if this process i mean presumably this was an important thing because its delay affected your performance review so it was probably important to your manager too and and if there was a project that was delayed that they cared a lot about and the solution was they just had to go tell someone hey make your employee do this thing like today

i'm blocked on it that's that's a thing that's pretty easy for managers to do and part of their job too is like navigate around all these trees and graphs of communication in the organization yeah totally i love the idea about managing up so maybe maybe the surprise or the expectations were a problem but also i love it as a way to bring them in as someone who can help you instead of just... Yeah. Instead of just someone who gives you a bad review at the end of the year. Yeah. I definitely do this. I think, well, I'm doing the right thing and what happens happens and the right thing will just be known. The fact that I'm doing the right thing will be known in the universe and it's not. It's definitely not. That's right. That's right. One thing I wish I

were better at was saying more regularly what I was doing up and down. I think I'd do okay at it, but I could do much better. Oh, I'm terrible at this. And my boss has given me feedback several times, like, you need to be better at managing up. And I'm like, ah, I know I do. I'm just so bad at it. I don't know why.

I think it's a thing where I just don't seek fame and credit, for one. And two, I guess I fall victim to that same assumption that he probably knows what I'm doing. I'm sure it'll be fine. Yeah, my boss is smart and runs stuff at the company. And so clearly, and I have a good relationship with him and so obviously he'll know what's going on anyway i it's so bad of me and i need i just

need to carve out time i just i you know what i think is really happening here and i think it's me and i think it's probably every other engineer we are so task oriented like oh i have tickets i do tickets i feel good when tickets are done and then i don't need to go tell someone i did the tickets i just want to do the next ticket you know like we just love tasks yeah this is also a downside of llms is guess what's a lot easier now tasks oh i can do more tasks oh oh with my limited time i can sneak in a few extra tasks i can even have the lms doing tasks when i'm not doing tasks yeah yeah but then and then there's some overhead of managing those tasks and okay i've got more tasks so i gotta get the prs and get reviews and yep and less time for strategery

that's right which is is always easy to postpone that never feels urgent that's right well i've helped myself i'm gonna do better starting at the end of this call i need to do better too i really need to put something on my like weekly calendar that's like okay give my boss an update probably in written form of all the things i've done and doing and let him chime in on anything yeah i'll do that i'll do that right now it's not even january 1st but i'm gonna do a resolution to to do that can you do i don't know i don't know are you allowed i don't know i i'm gonna find out if i'm in jail next week you'll know why local insane man attempts to start september resolution

populace kept safe by brave actions of law enforcement okay you want to hear my bad review story where i didn't get to tell my side yeah okay this one's going back let's see it might be 20 years now i don't want to tell the story anymore it's been too long okay i sit down for my annual review and my boss says okay dave here's your raise for the year we think you did a really good job your raise is not as high as it would have been because of this thing you did. And I'm like, oh, what was it? And he said, well, you rewrote someone's code and something about, honestly, it's been long enough that I can't remember exactly what he said. And I can only remember the version of the story that paints me in the best light.

So yeah, yeah. Well, now I'll just tell my side. I would like to hear that version. My side of the story is, we had a team member who was responsible for some code on this project I was working on and i as i do today i have kind of this this built-in extreme ownership approach to everything where i just feel like everything has to be done really well and if it's not i'm going to make it my mission to get it done well and um before i learned to really temper this uh and and make this laser focus only for good i would sometimes do things that were a little bit i guess you could say they would step on others toes or hurt people's feelings and there was a case where there was an engineer on our team who was he was famous for moving very fast but producing super

crappy code that no one else could maintain and it was just like nonsense and and it would more or less get the job done it had bugs and no one else could fix them except him anyway so this developer contributed some code to my project and i kind of vocally criticized it and rewrote it and then that developer told my manager about the situation because i guess his feelings had gotten hurt which you know reasonably so and then my dad ended up docking me a couple of percentage points on a raise that year. And I realized at that moment that my manager had never heard my side of the story, that I felt like I was doing everything I could to deliver this project on time, high quality, what the customer needs. And so I just did this thing. You know, I stepped out

of my own area of responsibility to help ensure that this was done well. And by the way, this developer has a terrible reputation for shipping crap all the time. My manager knew none of that stuff. And so by the time I sat down at my review, it was way too late to explain all that stuff, like months too late to explain any of that. Yeah. The narrative had kind of stuck in their mind. Exactly. And all the financial decisions had been made and locked in long ago. So by managing up, I could have avoided that raise miss or bad review and probably could have solved some other problems too like you were saying jameson like if my manager knew that this engineer was creating so many problems on the team my manager could have talked to that engineer's

manager and maybe gotten a better result yeah but we've all learned and grown from it i have sorry to pass dave i know it was hard and young whippersnapper i'm glad it happened though because it taught me a lot about other people's feelings taught me a lot about communication and i'm still terrible at managing up but i'm turning over a new leaf for my september resolution i will begin doing that better i love september resolutions as an idea that sounds great i'm also turning over the same leaf i i copy your leaf nice i put it in my calendar instead of listening more closely to what you're saying maybe we can be in cellmates when we're in jail together for doing a september resolution yeah we don't we can't we can't endanger anyone else maybe they'll let us have

microphones in jail and we can keep doing the podcast oh yeah probably i assume i yeah i choose to believe that's how jail is yeah that's how jail works all right have we answered the question i think so good luck good luck what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button there's a little form there and all you got to do is fill it out you can put your name or not or you could make up a name like k-pop demon hunter did we love it we love reading your questions they are they are just absolutely thrilling every one is like a novel that i just can't stop turning the pages of i am concerned about the speed at which you read they're pretty short yeah that's true there are actually no pages

they've printed them out on on at size 700 font yeah to make sure i'm turning pages yeah one page per letter thank you thank you for listening we appreciate you and we will catch you next week