Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 491: Re-arranging deck chairs on the Titantic and my boss leaks private info

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I handed in my resignation this past Monday. During the conversation, my manager confided in me that this coming Wednesday, 25% of the workforce is being laid off. For context, this is the second round of layoffs. The first round happened a year ago and was a disaster. It was announced via an internal video the night before, but the CEO forgot to mention that the affected employees had already been notified privately. This caused mass panic; thinking they were next, many experienced engineers immediately brushed up their resumes and jumped ship voluntarily. Even my skip-level manager was in the dark. Shortly after that chaos, we were acquired by an American Private Equity firm. Morale has been at an all-time low ever since, and the writing has been on the wall all year. Now I am in the awkward position of serving my three-month notice period while walking through the ruins of my company. I am the “lucky one” who quit voluntarily two days before the hammer dropped to join a different company for a massive raise and promotion, while my colleagues are about to lose their jobs. How do I navigate the next 90 days? How do I interact with the survivors who are likely furious and overworked, knowing I’m already checking out? Sincerely, Rearranging Deckchairs on the Titanic Hello! I have a bad manager, like really bad. She gets the whole team together to say “so and so is getting laid off tomorrow, or in a month, don’t say anything”. She openly shares employee compensation in 1-1’s, gossips about her boss and team members and takes feedback as personal attacks. Would you believe me if I said that no one trusts her? What should I do? I want to contact HR but I have never talked to HR before in my career. I know I can’t tell her because engineers who have offered feedback on team dynamics, or general professionalism, get yelled in 1-1’s. Is this something worth taking to HR or do I just live with it until… I get a new job? If I do say something what do I say? Do I bring up the distrust she has created amongst the team or do I keep it to the poor judgement and unprofessionalism? Do you want to write the letter for me? Yes!? Thanks!

it takes more than burning 10 million ai tokens on an accidental refactor only to throw it all away to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 491 i am your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers whose budgets know no bounds as long as it's spent on ai long has it been the privilege of upper management to throw away enormous amounts of software work at a whim now thanks to the magic of llms you too can do that how does it feel oh it feels so good yeah i just did this right now i i said build a feature and then i went and talked to someone and came up with a much better way to build the feature and it feels so nice that the cost is is

basically zero while i'm doing other stuff sort of zero zero ish yeah zero ish zero in terms of your time and even sort of zero in terms of my time yeah zero ish if the thing okay you can round anything down to zero true depends on how aggressively you round true day should i thank our patrons i was hoping you would all right thank you to these folks who get weekly shout thank you to ci issues sharpenty.io seth is begging for a review on his pr and hardware is a mr pork chop uh hey siri learn react testing at howtotestfrontend.com party emoji jack-o'-lantern emoji bounce the parens but forgot the emoticons smiley face you can't oh if you can't tie a knot tie a lot all right huh that should be a metric for these there's the laughs metric and there's

the huh my actual name on linkedin is yammy debugging in the dark canny the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table meow mix jacob's handling um hey dave and jamis dash on let's get our jams on oh record that skill song soft skill at nation everybody sing along yeah this is the first rhyming patron i think unless you count rhyming stuff with benedict cumberpatch to be rhyming but yeah the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer i'm wondering if the alexa set an alarm to 4am prank still works hashtag the grind hashtag never give up that's the soft skill nation motto big props to the real mvp jameson and king dave rad rad rad rad nick bonu if the service org uses a subservice organ that controls

at the subservice org are necessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel a single opening parenthesis dan from drone to play never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meomics meomics please deliver swiss python okay i will measure text bandwidth beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit simple is betta betta now you know how many characters go through kyle boss can't see dodds pause for dramatic effect jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan kings and i beautiful functional only use the documentation i thought you pull fresh patreon names every friday if will angel was good at self-promotion he would be a double senior staff engineer that does yeah what does

self-promotion mean does it mean you literally promote yourself to a higher position oh yeah that's a good point self-promotion i'm not good at it i've received a promotion from myself yeah soft wars episode five benchmark culture crash strikes back braden canes john grant britney closed parenthesis with a single closing parenthesis thank you thank you to one and all we appreciate your support it makes the show better because it funds the podcast performance enhancing drugs that dave uses that are leaving him just a shell you don't see the crash that happens as soon as we stop recording but it's all worth it it's awesome if you want to join them go to soft skills soft skills.audio and click support us on

patreon where any amount will give you an invite to our slack team enough of an amount will get you a shout out and maybe enough people contributing will get me some of those podcast performance enhancing drugs so i will stop mispronouncing words or mumbling nice dave do you want to read our first question let's do it this comes from an anonymous listener who says i handed in my resignation this past monday during the conversation my manager confided in me that this coming wednesday 25 of the workforce is being laid off for context this is the second round of layoffs the first round happened a year ago and was a disaster it was announced via an internal video the night before but the ceo forgot to mention that the affected

employees had already been notified privately this caused mass panic thinking they were next many experienced engineers immediately brushed up their resumes and jumped ship voluntarily even my skip level manager was in the dark shortly after that chaos we were acquired by an american private equity firm morale has been at an all-time low ever since and the writing has been on the wall all year now i am in the awkward position of serving my three-month notice period three months must be europe yet while walking through the ruins of my company i am the quote lucky one who quit voluntarily two days before the hammer dropped to join a different company for a massive raise in promotion while my colleagues are about to lose

their jobs how do i navigate the next 90 days how do i interact with the survivors who are likely furious and overworked knowing i'm already checking out sincerely rearranging deck chairs on the titanic oh there are so many beats here the botched layoff it's like saying fire really loud or bomb really loud on a plane but what you what you did is say hey don't worry there's not a bomb on the plane oh man and yeah the the hints that they're in europe ending with we've been acquired by an american private equity firm yeah oh the just the death knell for being employed at a company and just on behalf of the private equity the american private equity industry of which i am not a part i extend my deepest condolences for what you're about to experience yeah maybe my like

401k somehow indirectly is benefiting from maybe i will have fractions of pennies because of this terrible that's a terrible thought my retirement has just become closer by a few seconds yep oh brutal i okay my thought is you can spread joy and happiness in this time by communicating to your colleagues that a better world is possible they are heads down trying to survive they feel under attack they feel at risk they they have to perform because they've just seen all these people get laid off and and so there's a bunch more work to do and also they know that the threat of layoffs is there's some principle that like you can tell how how soon a thing will happen again by how recently it happened i don't know what it's called but i think you just named it

recent layoffs propose yeah they they imply future layoffs coming up soon so they do i can see why they would feel miserable and you can dive in and and roll up your sleeves and shoulder and say i'll help you while i'm here you can also just be unbothered and blissful and say you know you don't have to be here there are other jobs out there not everyone can get every job i believe everyone can get another job though so maybe by floating above it and saying that sounds like a problem for not me in 92 days you can spread some hope i bet it feels pretty helpless i okay i was not in the same situation at all it wasn't an acquisition there weren't rounds of layoffs but when i quit my job at a giant megacorp it was a retailer and black friday and kind of november

december holiday sales were a soul-crushing experience yeah and even though i quit in i think i quit in the summer no i quit in the spring but still it was looming even though it was like six months away you're like oh man yeah yeah it was six months away but really the code freeze was coming in like three months because the code freeze happened several months ahead of the event. Anyways, I felt I both entertained myself and felt I was providing a valuable service by spreading some levity in my final weeks there when we were talking about very serious things. So maybe this is somewhat self-serving. I'm just trying to say, do what I did, which wasn't just to make me laugh, even though it did make me laugh.

There's a couple of interesting things happening in this question to me. One is, I was just trying to think, what happened in the CEO's planning and whoever orchestrated these first layoffs a year ago? Whatever happened in the planning session such that the communication got botched so badly? Yeah. To say, hey, I'm just imagining the planning process where the CEO's like, okay, we need to notify everyone. And I want it to happen at the end of the day, before the next workday. And then I'm going to get on and tell everyone who survived the news. but it's just like that one little piece of context you're the ones who don't worry if you're

receiving this email you are not impacted yeah it's just like oh yeah left that off it's like so clear everything's clear in the planner's mind and in the ceo's mind except that one thing of course they're they're not impacted because they're the ones i'm sending the email to yeah you're still here and you can't quit and get a new job immediately right i i doubt they said there was mass panic thinking they were next any experienced engineers

brushed up their resumes and jumped ship voluntarily I assume that they didn't overnight quit and get a new job but yeah

I also the chaos probably made them feel like well I'm I thought I was fired only to find out I'm not I'm not going through that again

getting out of here yeah hmm wonder how much money that cost them oh boy yeah maybe that lowered

their price enough so they could be acquired by the American private equity firm right maybe it was a plan oh i mean the ceo probably made a whole bunch of money from this acquisition very likely yes very likely and sometimes cutting costs and increasing your your earnings number is a

precursor to an equity event like this so totally possible oh well also you know there's something to be said here for this 90 day um what do they call it i don't know some kind of i don't want to call it a probationary period but apparently you give 90 days of notice to this company and or in this country whatever that is and i was thinking you know in the u.s we do this like professional courtesy two weeks notice but it's not really required and two weeks even is a lot lot shorter than 90 days and i thought you know what there is an advantage to that which is i mean you just kind of get it over with you know this poor person yeah is gonna spend 90 days yeah that's a quarter of the year yeah it's a long time they can spend a lot of time i don't know

what you're going to be doing in that time but it's a lot of time to spend around people whose jobs you know are a coming up to be laid off here in a couple days and then the survivors are the ones you're going to spend the rest of the 90 days with that's rough i'll demonstrate my knowledge of space law and my comparative lack of knowledge of european employment law but i assume that there are comparative there's a contract here and there's there's protections for the people who are laid off and like they have to give you 90 days notice or maybe more notice if they're if they're eliminating your position or firing you or whatever so it kind of makes sense it goes both ways but it does i don't know what i'm going to be doing at this job 90 days from now but maybe i

should huh i don't think i know enough things to have 90 days of knowledge transfer yeah like you'd run out of stuff after a couple weeks yeah i guess you just do work yeah i mean that's probably what they intend for you to do or not hmm how do i navigate the next 90 days yeah i mean what do you yeah okay you could pretend like you have you could pretend like you're an american and you only actually have 14 days and so you just pretend like you have a normal job for most of the time and then have a two week long notice period where you check out or do knowledge transfer or whatever you want to do so you don't actually tell anyone i mean i guess yeah it's so weird to me this person just seems so unbothered by all the stress happening around them i want to

be like them and you just how is their secret cool as a cucumber that's what they call this guy yeah wow they really started they started speaking truth to power recently and saying some bold things to the company leadership aren't you worried about getting fired nope maybe i'll be like them i don't gotta care in the world yeah yeah and then you copycat then you get fired Okay. I have some more practical suggestions, which are, I assume there's a lot of knowledge transfer to do, especially if there's an acquisition and a bunch of the company has been laid off. It's probably pretty chaotic. You could, you have a bit more freedom and flexibility, I believe, since you're leaving to do what you think is right and, or do what you want, I guess. there's always this implicit threat of like or else you'll get a bad performance review and or get fired and that's kind of gone for you and you could use this to invest in technical work that you think will benefit your team in the future that they might have a hard time justifying given

the current chaos like you could also just jump right into the roadmap and just grind out tickets really well and help get a bunch more stuff done and maybe if there's essential things only you can do that's that's helpful i don't think that will reduce the team's stress very much to just have even more things churning through the pipeline but if you can i don't know maybe there's some bold refactoring you can do while i'm saying this i'm just imagining all the horrible ways this goes you do the bold refactoring peace out and then leave everybody else to clean up but yeah maybe there's yeah there's just this service everyone hates it's horrible to maintain maybe you say I will ease this burden because you don't have permission to do it. But I don't need permission

to do it because what are they going to do? Fire me. I already quit and I'm in my 90-day non-probationary period. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I would probably do in this time period is something that I've appreciated when coworkers do for me when they're on their way out the door, which is they they get some real honest fresh talk from everyone so for example we had someone quit a company this is going back a long time and on his way out he was like you know tell me some of your concerns and i can share those in my exit interview so he spent a good amount of time collecting essentially collecting employee feedback from his team members so that he could aggregate that and share it as if it was his own in the hr exit interview and it served us very

well actually because he was able to say some things that other people at the company just didn't feel comfortable saying you know how there's feedback you want to give management but you're like eh i'm not i'm not going to be the one to say this out loud right like there is yeah certainly that happens right you're just like i don't know if this is going to backfire on me and so he said it for us and i was i was really appreciative and honestly like within a month or two we all got across the board salary increases and it was definitely thanks to his work because he focused on that as a priority. And he realized that a lot of people were not happy with their pay. And single-handedly, I would say he got everyone a raise on his way out the door. It

was really cool. So maybe you could pull out. I don't think you're going to get someone a raise here. Probably not in this acquisition layoff environment. Yeah. If this company is getting gutted, you might not really have a lot of feedback to share, but I don't know. Here at American Private Equity Firm, we really want to take care of our people. That's why we're giving you all a raise the main reason we bought this company is to make life better for the employees yeah we want to improve your work-life balance yeah it's our core investment strategy we're trying to turn around the poor reputation of american private equity for how they treat their portfolio companies right i don't know i i just think 90 days is so much a long time to be

the one who's leaving. I think it's a cool, cool opportunity you have. I think most people want to do good work. And it's pretty rare, especially for software engineers who are often passionate about building stuff and technology. It's pretty rare that they just want to do nothing and be lazy. There's always constraints imposed on you by the business and the team. And you do have kind of a unique opportunity to say, if I could do whatever I wanted for work, like in the scope of this job and employment that I think would be better for the company and or the team, what would I do? And it's easier to do that stuff now. Yeah. As long as you don't leave anyone in a lurch. Yeah. What I really want to do is destroy the code base with a half-baked refactor that I

don't finish. I'm trying to think about folks who have left and if they've done really great, meaningful things on their way out like this person you described the exit heroes yeah i can't think of anybody i have heard some candid feedback from people that has been useful i don't know it's kind of ended with a whimper but i think that's the end of my advice yeah exactly just i mean it's like what do you do just i guess just enjoy your time you know i don't know what else to tell you this is just such a strange policy it doesn't even it's a question i've never even considered because it's just never been on my radar i think there's a lot of unethical answers you could give which are start a side business take 90 days of vacation i don't know but i mean

yeah i'm assuming you want to work and be effective and meet my definition of ethical whatever that is yeah all right i think we've answered it all right good luck good luck for the next 88 days yep should i read our next question let's do it okay this is from a listener called a man with no plan hello i have a bad manager like really bad she gets the whole team together to say so and so is getting laid off tomorrow or in a month don't say anything she openly shares employee compensation in one-on-ones gossips about her boss and team members and takes feedback as personal attacks would you believe me if i said that no one trusts her what do i do i want to contact hr but i've never talked to hr before in my career i know i can't tell her because engineers who have

offended feedback or who have offered feedback on team dynamics or general professionalism get yelled at in one-on-ones is this something worth talking to hr or do i just live with it until i get a new job if i do say something what do i say do i bring up the distrust she has created amongst the team or do i keep it to the poor judgment and unprofessionalism do you want to write the letter for me yes thanks oh do i want to write the letter for you oh my goodness yeah i'll write it oh it won't be good can you imagine showing up at a team meeting and having your boss say oh yeah it's for on a one-on-one yeah did you know so-and-so's getting laid off next week or oh man yeah this is pretty wild super boss about her boss and team you know i don't know that

feels pretty hypocritical you're kind of gossiping about your boss right now to us are you gonna take this feedback as a personal attack too yeah exactly no this seems this seems pretty wild i think there's always some amount of interpreting bosses actions and giving context that maybe can nudge up to a line of gossiping about your boss some of that is sort of a manager's job but if you're just i don't know bad mouthing your boss and saying, well, they made this dumb mistake or you'll never believe how many crepes they ate at this function.

It doesn't feel very useful. The crepe consumption is just the classic boss. Yeah. I once trash talked my boss and I may have told this story on the show before. Maybe I should repeat it. It's been a while. But I was frustrated with my boss

doing what I consider to be overreach into the scope of a project that I was leading. And so I complained pretty vocally to the rest of the team because my boss had kind of stepped in and made some decisions that I felt were mine to make and not his. And so I complained somewhat loudly and it got back to him.

And he's such a good manager. He sat me down. I'm just so slow with picking up on this stuff. He sat me down. He's like, Dave, I want to tell you a little story about my early career, some things that I did. And he proceeded to tell me a story about how he had undermined the authority of his boss by making demeaning comments about his boss back when he was younger. And I was like, oh, cool story, bro.

I had no idea he was talking about me. Like he was basically saying, I'm like, I don't know why you're telling me this story, but cool. Like, I'm glad you learned from it. Literally days later, I just kind of was like, okay, cool. I didn't actually say any of this stuff. Like, I don't know why you're telling me. but literally days later I'm sitting here I think I was like laying in bed and I just this memory came in of what he had said to me a few days earlier and I was like oh my gosh he's talking

about me I just did not connect the dots and that really left a mark on me I still think about it this was over 10 years ago but I still think about that like I think not only about what I said and did to undermine his authority and how that actually harms the team but I also thought about how how gently he provided me feedback and allowed the feedback to to marinate until it hit me like a ton of bricks on my own schedule and now it's just like etched into my memory so not that that helps this listener but it was a fun no it doesn't it's a fun thing it does make me i think there's a principle there about the the more authority you have in a position the the more receptive you have to be to feedback and the more careful you have to be to giving it yes you have to be hyper

receptive and very sparing in how you hand it out yeah if he had just laid into you i i doubt that would have helped very much no i think it would have poisoned the relationship and it would have bred resentment in me even though i would have acknowledged that i was wrong i still would have I would have thought it was like now two now we both have done wrong yeah hmm I I'm thinking of the boss I had the most conflict with it wasn't like this I just butted heads with with him a lot I never thought I should talk to HR though because I had some earlier experiences that very clearly illustrated to me at this company at least HR could do nothing except make my life worse yes and this was a big enough company they didn't have any connection to to my i don't know

continent of the organization there's no way that me complaining would result in any action or changes or anything it would it would just it would be a bunch of paperwork so i think if you do want something to change talking to hr about it is probably a last resort on your way out or as you decide, I'm definitely going to quit or look for another job. I think it's more likely to make your life worse than to make your boss any better. 100% agree. And I really wanted to zoom in on that question. That's part of the reasons I wanted to do this question on the show today is someone is asking, should I contact HR to change the behavior or improve my working conditions for, or what's the right way to say this? Should I contact HR about a problem the

company has? The answer is absolutely not. You do not understand what HR's job is. You do not understand their mission. Their mission is to protect the company from you. It is not to help you. Now, look, before all the HR, all the 17 listeners on the show who are HR people say something to us, I want you to know that HR people do take many forms, but the bigger the company, the more true it is what i am saying yeah at a small company you're the part-time hr rep you're probably a good person with good intentions and you know everybody you know what everyone does you know everyone's managers you know all the relationships and you might be able to give advice but yeah yeah and you at a small company as an hr person you probably do care about the working

conditions and helping team members but i have to tell you the bigger the company the more hr's job is one and only one thing, protect the company, protect the organization. And largely that is protecting the organization from the people who work there. So if you raise your hand and bring a concern to HR, not only are you not likely to get anything improved in your work, but also it could be very much worse for you. One wrinkle here, you said protect the company from you, it really from you suing them and winning or being expensive to deal with in some way that's one very reasonable vector there is a you know that scene in one of the thor movies where it turned into one of those meme templates where like you can't defeat me there's there's thor

fighting against somebody and then he says no but this guy can he points to some other guy If the best way to keep the company from getting sued is fire your boss because they've done something so egregious that you've documented well enough, then you will invoke the wrath of HR against your boss because they will now be protecting the company from you suing them because they've done something so horrible that you have such clear evidence that it will be really expensive for them. That rarely happens. Have you seen that go down? I've never seen it go down. Okay, yeah, I haven't either, but I just have this image of HR making life bad for everyone involved,

including the person who brought the issue to their attention. Do you remember Susan Fowler? She worked at Uber. She worked in tech for a while and then broke a lot of the sexual harassment stuff at Uber. This was a long time ago now. Yeah, that's like 10 years ago.

I think I remember this. Yeah, and she was the perfect victim in that she documented everything. Her conduct was impeccable. the behavior was egregious of the of the executives right that she was yeah of the executives yeah and and like there weren't any strikes against her and it's still i don't think it went great i mean she doesn't work there anymore i don't know why you'd want to if it was that horrible but i suspect that if this does happen you maybe don't hear about it because

there's maybe documents signed to say and and we'll give you this money and make them go away please don't sue us or or whatever but i i think it is much more likely that it will make your life worse and nothing really will materially change about your boss's behavior from going to hr even in a very high profile case like susan fowler at uber it didn't go great for her i think at least her her uber career essentially probably read about it again because it's been like 10 years and i don't remember the details i just remember thinking like oh she she's the perfect victim here and look at how horrible her life was still during this experience yeah so i don't think hr is the answer so what is the answer it with this kind of personality the answer is probably

not talking directly to your boss if they have that bad of judgment about the information that they choose to disclose on the team and the things that they choose to say about their superiors and how they react to feedback yeah exactly it's just like you you probably don't have the power to influence this person's behavior. So if you really want to go the route where you just feel like you need to tell someone in a position of authority about this situation to improve it,

which I would be hesitant to do because I don't think that it'll end well for you. But even if you do want to go down that route, I think the best of the worst options is to talk to this person's boss. Yeah, I agree. I think generally your skip level will support your boss but it is a useful data point and if they see your your manager's team

suffering and people quitting and then you give them this feedback maybe it's enough of a data point to make some change generally it if it does happen it's pretty slow and if the change isn't fire them and replace them then it's going to be some kind of feedback and coaching and if your manager continues to behave like they've behaved, I bet they will probably not be pumped about the fact that someone complained to their boss and got them in trouble. I don't know. It might not go great for you, but I agree. It seems more likely to change behavior than talking to HR. Really rough though. Still not super likely.

If you really care about this person getting the memo that they are completely badly behaved and you're willing to sacrifice all to make that happen, the best way probably to accomplish that is to leave this company, because as they say, people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses, and probably should, and on the way out, share your reason for leaving. That message in that context will carry a lot more weight

because you have, I don't know, there's just something about someone leaving and HR's job is to collect the information about why in the exit interview and what the company needs to learn, sharing that information there, I think, is the most likely to effectuate a change in this person. Now, that might be that they get fired. It might be that they get some strong coaching

from the organization to improve their behavior. I think it is probably the most likely way. Now, it costs you a lot to do that. You have to leave your job. And so that's pretty painful and probably not worth it. So if I'm in this situation, I'm probably not going to stick around on this team if I have any reasonable options to go elsewhere.

At the very least, I'll move teams if I can. And I would probably eventually leave this company because there's also, there's something about a company culture that allows this to exist for an extended period of time. It says a lot about the culture. It's kind of like, how do we do things around here?

Well, we disclose private information, we badmouth each other, and we overreact to feedback or we respond badly to feedback. That's our company culture. And that's for sure the team culture here as influenced by this person. Like, so-and-so is getting laid off tomorrow in a month.

Don't say anything. Should you say something to the person who you learned is getting laid off? It's like the trolley problem. Like, do you have an obligation now to? Yeah. Yeah. You pull the lever. I think no matter what action I would take, you probably won't be worse off if you write

down specifics about what is happening and what do you think is problematic. there is a danger here if you want to go to your skip level boss or hr or or present this feedback in some way to someone that it comes across as well they they clash they butt heads there's a personality conflict it both sides got offended this person doesn't like them yeah and and maybe there's some truth to that who knows but if you can say on this date in this meeting my manager said these words yeah which had this impact on the team that's very different from well but they did shoot down your project idea and then you've kind of been grumpy about them ever since and maybe you're you're taking things the wrong way so the more specific your feedback can be either

to your skip level or hr or even just i don't know your your diary the more actionable it is versus vague vibes of they make the team feel unsafe. Poor judgment and unprofessionalism is a good summary, but it's not good feedback to deliver to somebody else about this person. It needs to be specific. And I think in a situation like this where someone is behaving very badly, documentation is your friend. I totally agree with you, Jameson.

Write down everything you see and hear that you think is questionable. You may never use this, but there may come a time where, just based on the behavior of this manager, you might have to use it to defend yourself. I mean, who knows? If this manager says these kinds of inappropriate things with a setting of this team, there's a really good possibility they're also saying some really inappropriate things in context that could affect you. Like, I don't know, at performance review time with the senior managers, who knows? And so having these things written down could save your bacon. And if you really want to try to effectuate change, having them all written down is the only

way to get that done yeah i would also try to avoid editorializing when delivering this yes i think it can diminish from the impact or paint you as maybe more biased and make it easier to dismiss what you're saying if you say look how unprofessional they are look look at what their poor judgment is instead of letting this the facts and the context explain that yes save the editorialization for the soft skills engineering questions save it for us save it for us yeah but for the for your boss and everyone else just the facts just the facts and and i'll just tell you that saying just the facts allows a very important psychological phenomenon to take place which is that the people hearing the facts will form their conclusion themselves and it will probably if you

do your fact collecting and reporting well it will be the same conclusion you've come to but when someone forms their own conclusion, it is a much more strongly held conclusion and people feel a lot more convinced of it rather than you. And I've seen this firsthand. I remember many, many years ago, I had a member on my team. I've only done this, I think, twice in my entire 20 plus something year career, where there was a member of the team that I thought was performing so badly that they needed to be dismissed from the company. And so I collected my evidence and I went to my boss And I started with the conclusion of, I think this person needs to be fired. And then I presented all my evidence for why I felt that they needed to be fired. And in both cases, my boss did nothing. And I realized later, I should not have started with the conclusion. I should have said, I want to make you aware of some behavior of this team member. because I think as a manager,

it's something you would like to know. And I should have just shared the facts. Like I saw this behavior, I saw this behavior, I saw this behavior. And what you do with that is your business. Because quite frankly, it's out of my lane anyway.

Like I don't know the full picture. It's not my job as an individual contributor to be telling my boss who to fire. It was a dumb thing to do the way I did it. And so I learned. And since then, when I've shared just facts with people, like, hey, here's something I observed.

Action is much more swift and people feel, I think, a lot more persuaded. wise words well have we answered the question i think so it's a tough situation we wish you the best of luck yeah having a boss you don't get along with especially if you think they are bad or harmful i've never been more miserable at work than when this has happened but it gets better if you get a new boss right one way or another get a new boss you will you will learn from this all right what can people do if they want their own questions answer go to soft skills the audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our handy little form.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for asking questions. We will catch you next week.