Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 487: My manager ignores me during 1:1's and I am required to work in an empty office

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: “My manager insists on a weekly 1:1 with me, but he rarely pays attention. He’s often on his laptop, texting, checking email — basically anything but listening. I’ve tried sending agendas, rescheduling, reducing frequency, waiting until he’s less busy — nothing helps. I’ve even started sitting in silence until he notices I’ve stopped talking, but that only works for a minute. This has caused real problems. For example, he almost had me cancel a million-dollar project because he misheard me say “Java” instead of “JavaScript.” When he finally realized I was right, he said, “Every time I heard Java I automatically tuned out.” How do I handle a 1:1 with a manager who won’t pay attention, without risking my work or my relationship with him?” “I’ve worked for a big retailer for 10 years now and I used to really enjoy it. I liked my team a lot, problems we worked on, technologies we used. Unfortunately the last few yours brought a few rounds of layoffs and my old team doesn’t exist anymore and the new team is pretty much awful. They’re all on the East Coast, while I’m on the West Coast. I’m required to work EST hours but also to commute to the office 5 days a week and sit there alone and talk to my team on zoom. I’m a staff software engineer and I haven’t been programming much for the past year. Most of my time is spent in calls, I start every day with the same 3 calls. I live 50 miles from the office and I take a company shuttle that leaves at 7am. I’m required to join the calls from my phone. I leave for work at 6:30am, I’m back at home at 6:30pm. A few times a week I need to do deployment at 10pm. I tried speaking to my manager and to my director. They don’t care. My every attempt to improve our processes is met with opposition. My manager is afraid of changes. I can’t believe this is where I am but I’m too tired to prepare for job hunting. I can’t afford to quit. I don’t know how to get myself on track and dust off my programming and interviewing skills. I’m praying they’ll lay me off so that I can use the severance to do all those things. But this isn’t really a plan, it’s wishful thinking, and I’m afraid that my career options are getting worse by the minute. Do you have any advice on how to get myself out of this hell hole?”

it takes more than having a relationship with a hot new model to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 487 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers who i don't even know what this intro honestly threw me off i almost forgot to say half of the things i'm assuming i mean let's be honest we're software engineers these are frontier models from ai companies right these are more it's the same as having a relationship with the gpu because that's what you're actually talking to yeah yeah i mean i guess i didn't even think about that it's it's literal for some people where they have they have built a relationship with

whatever saved context open ai has around their chat gpt stuff or whatever wrapper you're using some of that stuff is pretty horrifying and feels quite dystopian you mean the system prompts do or what no just i haven't looked too much into it because i i fear what i will see but i've heard about there are all kinds of companies building virtual boyfriend girlfriend partners they work either they use models that don't have the same safeguards or work around them somehow they they store a bunch of context so you feel like this thing knows you and yeah it seems to have ruined some lives of people who might be susceptible to that kind of thing yeah so i've heard so i've heard it is funny though infinite jest is is real and it's been real for a long time and it's even

more real with gen ai there's there's just like this form of of media that if you consume you lose all brain functionality and i just want to clarify a few definitions of words in this intro today so when i said hot i was referring to temperature and that is the temperature of the the system that's powering the model and by model i literally mean a large language model so that is what we mean by it takes more than having a relationship with a hot new model thank you for clearing just in case just in case there was any room for misinterpretation anyway weird intro but i had it had to be said i think david should i thank our patrons let's go for it thank you to these folks that we shout out every single week thank you to software was a mistake comma

but the best mistake we ever made those are two separate people wow incredible nice learn react testing at howtotestfrontend.com little party emoji and halloween what is that a jack-o'-lantern i guess beta test compiler cache always use neverendingstorypointer.com so i can just when i thought i was out they pulled me back in and then the fingers of i don't know that italian gesture emoji oh yeah i fight fires as a hobby because it's so much less stressful than my tech job my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging in the dark county the mobile development ordinaire first of his name quote or one equals one drop table meow mix jacob shandling would you rather write all your code in german or only use emojis in your pr description and comments

though a tough call it's a new yeah i'm gonna have to go with the german because i think i could actually say something that someone else could have a chance of understanding i feel like it would be an interesting constraint to try to communicate technical details with only emojis oh definitely i would want i'd want to try that just to see what it feels like it might force people to get to the point on their comments you know yeah just a big pile of poop that's the description okay uh the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer noah labhart every time jameson laughs a new ai model is born oh boy okay uh 2000 open parentheses no we'll never we'll never evaluate i feel so imbalanced right now yeah daniel remsburg nick

molyneux if the service org uses a subservice org and the controls at the subservice org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel jameson dance dance refrigeration yes a single open parenthesis dan from drone deploy never is not just a crate on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver liver miamix miamix please deliver dave you said you might come to the swiss python summit but you did not eventually i feel so bad about that ken c dodds that guy over there jenny kim the stochastic parrot quentin we have not heard from you in a month please go see susan in hr asap jonathan king is now a beautiful functional user documentation knock knock oh i like where this is going yeah will angel has a was a guest on episode 276 of the federal tech

podcast oh oh cool congrats softwar is episode four a new sprint braden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis and then a single actual closed parenthesis character thank you thank you so much you contribute to the show financially and content wise because i guess we just read all your names for a few minutes and to dave and i's combined sense of well-being and happiness if you want to join this group you can go to soft skills.audio click support us on patreon any amount will get you an invite to our slack team and enough of an amount will get us to say something whatever you change your patreon name to every week thank you thank you i love it do you want to read our first question dave yes i do this comes from mr invisible who says

my manager insists on a weekly one-on-one with me, but he rarely pays attention. He's often on his laptop, texting, checking email, basically anything but listening. I've tried sending agendas, rescheduling, reducing frequency, waiting until he's less busy. Nothing helps. I've even started sitting in silence until he notices I've stopped talking. But that only works for a minute. This has caused real problems. For example, he almost had me cancel a million dollar project because he misheard me say java instead of javascript when he finally realized i was right he said well every time i heard java i automatically tuned out how do i handle a one-on-one with a manager who won't pay attention without risking my work or my relationship with

him oh rough oh brutal so tough i assume this is in person because i feel like it would be harder to tell if your manager was texting if it was over zoom i mean you could still probably tell a little bit but that makes it even worse that it's in person imagine if it's on zoom and your manager just makes it so obvious by like holding his phone up in front of his face and texting with his two thumbs you can totally see him sharing his screen you see him pop open the chat the the text app or his email client you get to read all his email i guess that could be interesting that sucks i don't think i have paid 100 attention to all 100 of my one-on-ones but i would like to hope i'm better than this it sounds like either he's bored and doesn't care about what you have

to say and or he's just really bad at like caring about the people on his team it could be both oh man i'd oh this i gotta say i do think jameson we just need to take a couple of moments and just sympathize with this person who has to sit here and is just speaking into the void and the manager is just not listening it would feel very demeaning the one that really gets me right in the heart is i've even started sitting in silence until he notices oh if someone did that to me i'd be like oh my gosh i am so sorry i am so sorry i yeah i mean on the one hand i'd be very apologetic and feel really bad on the other hand i would be so ashamed that i'd like to pretend it didn't happen you both just sit in silence then the whole time yeah i'll just stare

back at you a silent one-on-one i that's a technique you could use to mix it up yeah for next one-on-one let's just not speak 30 minutes just in silence that would be really hard i don't yeah i don't think i could do it i mean it'd be very easy to do if i immediately started doing other things and just forgot i was in a one-on-one oh yeah totally but imagine it's just you and your team member sitting alone in an empty room for 30 minutes i think this ends with you smooching right if the my so my wife and i had been married like 10 years and there was this new york times article floating around about staring into each other's eyes and asking each other these meaningful questions and she could not do it we we sat and stared into each other's eyes and she could not

she just kept looking away or laughing or i don't know so even even even us we are so deeply connected and have a great relationship but i can't even imagine doing that with a co-worker it'd be so horrible i just want to know like why you expected your wife to stare at you and not laugh this was a failure of planning i think you're right i should have had cool sunglasses on oh so rough okay okay i've got i've got a couple of observations and then i do have two ideas for how to solve this problem but one observation i have found and i i'm just gonna i know jameson you're probably right this is probably an in-person situation although quite frankly i find it way harder to tune out people in person than i do over a zoom meeting yeah so

So if this is indeed a Zoom meeting, I believe that we as a society are, and when I say we as a society, whenever I say that, I just mean there's some number of people that's not a tiny number who suffer from this phenomenon where we consume so much media in real time that immediately appeals to our attention span. that when that same box where we consume that media now has to be used to concentrate and focus on a job at hand or talking to a coworker, it's really hard, really hard. And I find myself constantly distracted in Zoom meetings. I have to go to great lengths to cut all that crap out. Where are the subtitles? Where's the bottom half of the video

that has somebody doing a jumping puzzle in Minecraft? Exactly. And for me, the number one thing is, How do I speed up the audio? And I really, I had this epiphany just this week before I read this question that I struggle with online video communication because I'm so used to consuming human speech at 2x now. That's audiobooks, podcasts, even YouTube videos.

I go 2x on almost everything. And I think it has ruined me for normal communication. In fact, I bet the people listening to my voice right now are listening on 2x yeah yeah i'm sure a lot of them are i mean i can't stand to listen to this podcast on anything but 2x it sounds terrible to me okay either you speak twice as fast to make them listen at 4x or you speak half as fast to you got to downgrade their 2x to 1x what do oh let me do a slow laugh i can't do it better that's interesting i i speed things up sometimes if it's a how-to video on youtube i

will crank that sucker up but if it's something i'm trying to digest i've found that i can hear the words but not react to them or engage with them meaningfully very much if it's at 2x so i know i haven't i haven't hopped on the 2x train i also don't listen to audiobooks out of snootiness you don't listen to audiobooks at all no but you're a big reader i don't think i ever have listened to an audio well actually when i was a kid and we drove across country we would listen to audiobooks oh like as a whole family yeah just as a way to keep alive but i've never i've never done it just for my own entertainment i do listen to a lot of podcasts though you also don't have a commute and you haven't had one in years so yeah that's true yeah but anyway you do a lot of

reading and you can't 2x the reading without just getting faster at reading i guess yeah i i like half x the reading it takes me a long time to read complex stuff i'm surprised to hear that because you're such a prolific reader that usually people who read as much as you do are pretty fast well i can read the words fast but if it's something difficult i have to wrestle with it yeah slowly i can't just crank through papers like i i feel like some people can just maybe i I just don't have the background in some of these things, so it takes me longer, but I don't know. Anyways, enough about us.

The question. I have three solutions for you that are situation dependent. So I'm going to give these as like a switch statement. So I'm going to switch on the situation. So case when situation is in person, one-on-one, invite your manager to go on a walk for your one-on-one. Get them away from all the stuff that's distracting them. I like this.

I used to go on walks on remote one-on-ones, and then my reception got worse, so I stopped. Oh. I would just walk around my neighborhood doing one-on-ones. There is something really cool about walking around when you're talking to someone on the phone, I've noticed. And my daughter told me something really interesting about that. She said, people will sometimes pace when they're on the phone. And I'm like, yeah, I do that.

And she's like, some psychologists think you're doing this because subconsciously you're trying to find where the other person is. I love that. I do too. I choose to believe it's true. I'm like, where are you? That's awesome. You must be in here. I can hear your voice.

I'll literally just walk around my room in circles while I'm on the phone sometimes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If I'm standing up, I'm pacing. Yeah. Where is that voice coming from? It's so close. I know you can't fit in this little box I'm holding up next to my head.

That delights me. I know. Isn't it fun? Your brain is so cute. I know. Exactly. Where are you? Normally, all these biases are somewhat horrifying and harmful in some ways, but this is a cute

one. yeah so next case are you ready for the next case statement yeah okay i have done this for different reasons and for the right personality it is very very effective and that is for your one-on-one instead of sitting down synchronously record a video and send that to your manager and say here's my one-on-one for the week now this is one way what so it works really well for some personalities personalities who are visual more than audio like auditory personalities who like to be able to pause and think in ways that might be kind of awkward

in a real-time scenario. They need some more thought. People who interrupt a little more than usual, you know, and have a nice linear video that forces them to listen fully. And I found it works really great. Did you do this? I currently do this.

You record them for people or you consume recordings or both? I record only. So the current arrangement I have with my boss, and he loves this, is that every week I record a video for him and it's got slides on the screen with some visuals. Not complicated visuals,

just text to kind of denote what we're talking about. They're between eight minutes and 20 minutes long and he listens to them on 1.5X and then he sends me back an email with his comments and it works great. It works great for both of us. It actually works really well for me because throughout the week,

I accumulate a list of topics I want to make sure he's fully informed on and he has told me how much he absolutely loves it and it's working great. So- yeah interesting that's fascinating yeah it it surprised me how effective it was and i'm just i'm reading between the lines here and i'm thinking your your boss is so distracted by other things that maybe just meet your boss where he already is you know he's already on his laptop

reading things viewing things just insert yourself into that same channel yeah you could text him right he's texting somebody else yeah just send a little text that's a great idea during your one-on-one just send a text like so anyway i think we should use javascript for this million dollar project you'd look up me like what the that is a great idea or just yeah call him yeah i that video idea is very interesting i'm thinking about it now yeah give it some thought i have done i've gotten sloppy with it i should get better with this i have been good at the past in the past at recording thoughts in a one-on-one doc throughout the week and then we kind of follow up on all of them. But recording a video, I feel like it would be hard for me not to polish it a

lot. Yes. Well, good news. It's going to be actually easier for you than you might imagine because you have spent 487 episodes recording yourself speak in real time. Yeah, but they're not good. I do them in one take. So I make slides. I think about what I want to say. I write a few notes and then i just do it in one take and sometimes i i have to correct myself or i stumble upon my words but it doesn't matter that you can fast forward you know yeah so yeah i would i would want to go do like star swipe transitions yeah exactly a green screen behind me and once in a rare while i have had major av problems that took me way too long to fix like why is my little chrome extension that records my screen not recording my voice you know like

had to troubleshoot that for half an hour that sucked but most of the time it's pretty whose idea was this was this your idea or his idea this was my idea yeah huh now it's a cool idea this only works for some personalities so don't think of this yeah yeah like i hate receiving videos i hate it hate it hate it so much i actually wrote here this will tell you the kind of communication i like to receive i wrote a multi-page document explaining why sending videos is such a bad idea it's for all the reasons that i won't go into the details here but i don't like to consume them at all so my boss responds to me with an email and it's perfect like it is the he is adapting to my preferences for consuming information and i'm adapting to his and we're both happy interesting

so that that's the thing you've got to figure out how your manager wants to take in information and this listener has not tapped into that i mean whatever you are doing it is not working so you have to change yeah or else i mean you're you're both miserable your boss is so miserable that he's literally texting and checking email while ignoring you and that that takes effort you know to sit there in a room with them and and you're miserable because you're not being heard so find a find something creative to do to make it work so we've covered go on a walk record a video i worry the the answer to how your boss wants to consume information is from other people i know so that's from not you that's right that was my okay so my third case statement in the switch

is say stuff that's more interesting you know the difference between what team members want to share and what bosses want to hear is often pretty stark like things that might seem really important to you are just not important to your boss and that that is clearly happening you don't mean what they want to hear as in as a sycophantic or a flattery way like the the things that they are concerned about or interested in for work? Yes. The subjects of interest, the topics of interest. You clearly have a lot of daylight between those two lists, yours and his. So how do you find out what your boss is actually interested in hearing? You could ask him. You could be like, hey, what would be the most effective way for me to do these one-on-ones? But that's kind of an

open-ended question that's hard to answer. And so I would rather look at your boss's revealed preferences follow your boss in meetings figure out what meetings he's in and see what topics really engage him what does he care about the most based on when he closes his laptop puts the phone down and really starts listening what are those topics and hone in on that kind of thing in your one-on-one yeah i mean we did spend some time thinking about how awful this is but i guess that's the point of the suggestion is maybe you are just ranting about semicolons or

yeah there's a risk there if that's happening woof you're gonna have to figure that out and do some introspection it's possible yeah well I like it you've got a say stuff that's more interesting is the default case right yeah you don't you don't really fall through

or any unhandled cases it's yeah that's that's right that's in case the other two switch statement or other two case statements don't work this one just do that But literally if you say interesting stuff, it kind of doesn't matter the medium that you deliver it in I'm, just thinking about it. How do you say more interesting stuff? I don't know that feels like the million dollar question now That is the million dollar question Like how do you figure out what's actually important to your boss?

Which by the way, there will be a lot of side benefits to figuring that out Not just better one-on-ones, but you might actually be able to align your work better To do things that your boss thinks are more valuable Which could then turn into more money for you and a better work experience all around you could also one one way to approach this is to ask specific questions i know you said what is interesting to you is a bad question or you didn't say this but that was that was my interpretation of it i think that's right it's too vague it's too generic yeah exactly it's like when you walk up to someone you're like hey can you give me some feedback it's like uh about what

i don't know yeah this question was too general feedback delivered there's your feedback yeah yeah you could ask hey of the projects the team is working on which one feels the riskiest to you or which one are you most worried about and why and then how can we how can we help with that worry and yeah i think there's there's stuff you can ask about to get at what is on his mind and people are always interested in talking about themselves that's a classic conversation tool so maybe you are just monologuing at your boss and he is bad at saying i would like to talk about something else yeah okay well have we answered this question i think so good luck very challenging you got to figure this out or else you're going to be really hurting

yeah invisible and one-on-ones is a bad state to be in in general for your career too it's you need visibility if you want to be recognized and have opportunities so good luck dave shall i read our next question let's do it this is from an anonymous listener who says i've worked at a big retailer for 10 years now and i used to really enjoy it i liked my team a lot problems we worked on technologies we used unfortunately the last few years brought a few rounds of layoffs and my old team doesn't exist anymore and the new team is pretty much awful they're all on the east coast while i'm on the west coast i'm required to work eastern hours but also commute to the office five days a week and sit there alone and

talk to my team on zoom i'm a staff software engineer and i haven't been programming much for the past year most of my time is spent in calls i start every day with the same three calls i live 50 miles from the office and i take a company shuttle that leaves at 7 a.m i'm required to join the calls from my phone i leave for work at 6 30 a.m i'm back at home at 6 30 p.m this sounds horrible that's not in the question but i'll keep reading a few times a week i need to do deployments at 10 p.m i tried speaking to my manager and to my director they don't care my every attempt to improve our processes is met with opposition my manager is afraid of changes i can't believe this is where i am but i'm too tired to prepare for job hunting i can't afford to quit

i don't know how to get myself on track and dust off my programming and interviewing skills i'm praying they'll lay me off so that i can use the severance to do all those things but this isn't really a plan it's wishful thinking and i'm afraid that my career options are getting worse by the minute do you have any advice on how to get myself out of this hellhole oh gosh i'm praying for the sweet cold embrace of termination yeah oh you're like the best thing that could happen to me as a severance package i think we've said something to this effect before but this is a good example of how a business will happily take whatever you give them and they'll never say not never but people at the business might say you're working a lot of hours you need to slow down the

business itself will never say you're you're doing too much it'll just say yum yum yum yum yum thanks for all the extra value we extracted from you and yeah this seems like the situation you're in that you're you're doing a lot leave for work at 6 30 if you're working eastern hours why aren't you home at like 4 30 even that's still a 10 hour day which i don't know on the longer end of of a white collar normal work day but yeah this seems bad your whole team is on so what do you do about it here's what i would start doing i would say hey i can't do deployments at 10 p.m anymore sorry maybe you get fired good news you might get some severance if you get fired uh that that feels horrific yes maybe they're all on you because it's 10 instead of what would it be like 1 a.m

for east coast isn't it three hours yeah it's three hours but still that sucks that actually sounds worse for the east coast people the 1 a.m deploys 1 a.m deploys seem worse than 10 p.m deploys yeah i mean i i don't know maybe i'm over reading the missing text between the lines here but i'm sensing and oh boy you know what i gotta here comes a disclaimer we are space psychiatrists but i'm sensing a victim mindset here i hate my job it's terrible all these bad things happen to me and i'm too tired to change anything about this by quitting yeah i can't afford to quit i'm too tired i don't know how to get on track i've tried everything no one cares all these things happen to me i'm like yeah that these are bad things that happen to you and i hate this

for you and at the same time if you want it to change i think you know what you have to do this is a company that is not going to create a good environment for you at work it just is sadly they don't care i'm going to take at face value what you said they don't care about your satisfaction at work they literally are making you drive into the office 50 miles there and 50 miles back to sit in an empty room i mean they do not care about you it's so bad so it's time to quit but how do you do it look you've got a long time on the shuttle each direction it's time to use that time to prepare for interviewing and get out there and interview it's going to take effort but you'll be so happy when it's done take a company shuttle

yeah that's fair leaf work at 6 30 at least it's a shuttle not you driving yourself the whole time yeah looks like it's partially partially driving to the shuttle stop and then riding the shuttle for the rest of the time i mean yeah and if they're on the west coast yeah there's there's some tech hub they're going to yeah probably probably there are some less drastic options maybe you could transfer onto a different team that is west coast that is in person hopefully that means their hours are a bit more sane and you you work more normal hours you're around with people your your time zone more when i worked at a big retailer maybe it's the same retailer i don't know they've got offices on the west coast there were folks in bangalore that i worked with there

were folks on the east coast there were folks on the west coast and it was easy to say you had to cover the earliest to the latest people it was easy to fall into that trap there were there were meetings that could show up early and late on your calendar and i did not push back super hard i did a little bit but i usually am working too much not not enough but i i could see how that could have gotten much worse depending on the team or the circumstances but i also know it was definitely possible to transfer within teams oh yeah for sure if you feel like your new team is awful your director doesn't like you whatever this also could be them trying to get you maybe they legitimately don't like you and they don't want you on their team anymore and quitting is an

option maybe getting you to transfer somewhere else is is also great you're out of their hair they might be supportive of that yeah although i don't think this is a soft manage out situation limo josh right isn't that the thing we learned that's right limo josh i don't think this is limo josh i think this company has demonstrated that they have no problem pulling the trigger on terminating people if they wanted you gone you'd be gone oh based on they've done layoffs before yeah yeah i mean they eliminated the entire team this person used to work for he's at 7 a.m yeah okay i sitting in my chair with a job that has much more flexibility than this it is easy for me to say this but i i still look at this and say what happens if you say hey

i can't do the deploys at 10 p.m anymore a few times a week like you're already 12 hours away from home for work and then deploys at 10 that's brutal maybe the deploy process takes 45 minutes but there's you gotta lead up to it right you're not gonna go sit down and chill and then just suddenly instantly snap on into work mode again like there's probably extends a few hours into your night what are they gonna do presumably they had some option for this before you started doing it at 10 p.m this this feels like the most egregious part of it that just has a deep human cost yeah also at the same time when i worked at a large retailer i think i did deploys late at night but yeah and it was just normal but that meant that there were there were rotations and other

people could handle it and it wasn't all on me every time every week and there's also we did not deploy several times a week we were not continuously delivering software to production i'll put it that way yeah i don't know yeah what happens if you just say hey i can't do this anymore sorry yeah maybe you'll get your severance yeah but this isn't a hey i think our processes would be better if we did this other thing i mean maybe they are i'm just trying to think of why this is an untenable thing maybe maybe the east coast people are already participating and so you would feel guilty saying well you're here at 1 a.m i'm gonna do this at 10 p.m and i'm thrown a fit but still i i get a similar vibe as you dave they seem to feel trapped yeah and you

aren't trapped maybe if you're on some immigration status and you have to have this job or you get kicked out of the country yeah then that's harder you are kind of a modern surf in a way that sucks yeah painful if you're not i think your alternative is not have a job for a little while which sucks but also gives you more time to look for another job well they said they can't afford to quit so let's just take that at face value. And that's the thing. There are so many times in life where you find yourself in a hard situation. And the only way out of the hard situation is to make the situation temporarily even harder. I think that's where you are right now. And until you take that medicine and face the music, you like those two metaphors in a row, that was kind of

good. Until you do that, until you recognize that, yeah, I actually hate this more than I hate the idea of interviewing and preparing for an interview, you're going to be stuck. You're going to stay stuck. So that's what I would say is get out there. Look, set yourself a time limit. Give yourself, say, 90 days. I'm going to do 90 days of interview prep and interviewing for other jobs. And I'm going to see if I can dig myself out of this awful hole. Get creative and find the times in your day when you have available to do this that can work. And remember, you don't have to do it forever it's just until you can get yourself a new job and tell yourself that balance is a myth you are you are already living a totally imbalanced life your work-life balance is

completely jacked up and so now you're just going to double down on that bad balance so that you can get yourself into a more healthy wonderful place yeah i feel for you this is a yeah this would feel bad to be inside this situation yes it would but you know it'd feel worse staying in this situation for a long long time yeah like imagine this think of yourself one year from now if you're still doing the same thing oh that image is just it's just like it hurts my heart it hurts my soul to think of it but imagine saying i'm gonna take the next 90 days and i'm gonna bust my butt and i'm gonna find a way out of here then a year later you're gonna be like i am so glad that i that i did that extra work for those 90 days because my new job is awesome yeah yeah i i guess i agree

with you i don't see if if you literally can't quit you have to find another job while you still work here yeah and as painful as that is uh got some time on the commute yeah i would not say i have to dust off my programming and interviewing skills before i start applying i think the best prep is doing the thing and maybe you get lucky and land an interview for a job right away if if you land that you end up getting if you don't end up getting it count it as as practice and prep to get you back into the groove because it is kind of a a unique skill you don't use as much in normal everyday work so i i i think the sooner you start applying the sooner you can get some interviews to actually exercise those muscles a little bit you probably don't have a ton of drive to just go

grind on leak code or whatever but i don't know it's kind of like riding a bike my experience you if you are a staff software engineer you presumably were pretty good at this and it should come back without a ton of work yep you're not starting from scratch and and i gotta tell you people say the job market is really bad and of course it does seem bad to the onlooker but I'll tell you what, even though there are fewer jobs out there right now, if you're a good engineer, you will definitely shine in the job application and hiring process. I promise you, there's a lot of engineers out there looking for jobs. I know because I get hundreds and hundreds of applications for the jobs I have open who are just not that great. I don't know why it is right

now, but it is a good time to be a shining star on the job market as a job seeker. I agree with that that has been my experience as well that there's a high volume and low quality and if you stick out you really stick out yep so get out there and get it done you're a soft skills engineering you're a soft skillet of course you stick out yeah you are a soft skillet you're gonna do great yeah good luck i yeah this is rough but you can make it better yes you can we answer the question i think so good luck what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form with as much or as little information as you like thank you for listening we will catch you next week

oh hold on jameson oh what the soft skillet nation has voted on a sign off for this this episode and i just need to go through and tally the votes oh i missed the vote i just saw a big thread on it i just said i will say whatever gets the most reaction emojis oh there's some ai generated soviet style propaganda soft skill to unite and it's got this fierce looking dude in an apron with a skillet oh i did not see that one soft this is good too oh i saw that the obama hope picture it's just a skillet with soft underneath it pretty good okay i'm having a hard time there's not a lot of there's a lot of uniform votes here but the one that actually got the most votes was my only ask is that whatever ridiculous thing he

says he's not allowed to mention this slack thread that made him say it well that got the most votes so i guess that's where we are irony all right there you go there's the sign off all right soft skillet nation all right we'll catch you next week