Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 492: Fresh grads and startups or the goog

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener AWS multi-region is not real multi-region, ask me how I know asks, We’ve recently acquired some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new grads. What have you found to be the most effective way to onboard new grads into development roles? How has it changed (if at all) since the advent of LLMs? I want to make sure my new-grad crushing machine is operating as smoothly as possible considering the recent advancements in developer tooling. Those new grads won’t crush themselves! Listener Taso asks, Early in my career I was all-in on startups. Then I spent seven years in big companies in leadership roles. I learned a lot, but the politics and the pace were so slow that at some point I’m pretty sure geological processes were moving faster than our release cycles. So I finally flipped some metaphorical fingers and quit. Since then I’ve been interviewing almost exclusively with startups… except Google, where I somehow ended up with an offer on a team I’d genuinely enjoy. You’ve both bounced between big tech and startups—if you were in my shoes, how would you think about choosing between the two?

it takes more than asking santa for tokens for christmas to be a great software engineer this is episode 492 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host jamison dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development like asking say i don't know i don't know what to say besides the intro again i already have enough tokens i don't need more for christmas scrounging for tokens what do you get the software engineer in your life who already has all the tokens they want even more more tokens they'll find a way i feel like there's some kind of underlying principle here of as as some resource becomes cheaper you get a feel for

how expensive something is and where you need to optimize or be careful and then that feel gets made obsolete but that intuition becomes made obsolete as something becomes way faster or way cheaper and you can suddenly do stuff that would seem ridiculous and outrageous and impossible and insane before like some of it is for ill right you can write very slow very slow software now on very fast computers because there's this gigantic stack of abstractions doing things that might seem really wasteful but some of it is i don't know you could chat gpt a gpt 2.0 you could not like spin up 15 instances and have them all talk to each other and refactor this code base and research different parts and all come together and have coordinating agents and yeah yeah there's

probably some law that i cannot think the name of around that it's jameson's law yeah that's what i'll be famous for uh dave you want to thank our patrons absolutely big shout out thank you to those that are contributing at a level where we say whatever they say that their profile name is they are ciissuescharpenty.io Seth is begging for a review on his PR thank you for supporting us on Patreon with an I Jameson do you want to read our first question

okay well nope that was only number three we got a lot more sorry hey Siri learn react testing at howtotestfrontend.com ta-da emoji exclamation mark pumpkin emoji and yes you did get my phone to respond to that so thank you for that

I have to turn off my Siri now it's very confused about what it wants Siri's always confused but that one was extra confusing balance the parens but forgot the emoticons with the sad emoji if you can't tie a knot tie a lot

my actual name on LinkedIn is Yami debugging in the dark candy the mobile development ordinaire first of his name quote or 1 equals 1 drop table meomics jcob shandling hey Dave and Jameis on let's get our jams on record that soft skill song soft skill at nation everybody sing along all right now we just need

some music and we got that the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer this is my list of reasons why messaging apps should insert a line break when you press enter instead of send the message that's a great one there's no list in case you're wondering if the service org uses a subsurface org and the controls of the subsurface org are necessary, then quit your job. Nick Molyneux. That was good. If the service org uses a subsurface org and the controls of the subsurface org are necessary,

pretend it's not. Javier Gonzalez. Chewy. Ted Timbrel. A single opening parenthesis. Dan from DroneDeploy. Never is not just a creator on Mars. Flamingo emoji. I like chicken. I like liver. Meowmix. Meowmix, please deliver. SwissPython. Okay. I will measure text bandwidth. Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is bet.

Kyle Boss. Kent C. Dodds. Pause for dramatic effect. jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation neil breen is the best movie director of all time i don't know who that is oh wow either okay i got some movies to catch up on this weekend all right thank you will angel from drone deploy we have ho ho space ho ho ho ho all right little christmas fun there braden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis followed by a literal single closing parenthesis thank you so much to everyone who contributes on patreon especially

those of you whose profile names we just shouted out we love it absolutely love it i did not know who neil breen was but the first result for him on google is a pretty rad shirt yeah i see that missing a lot of its parts this looks like a tommy wiseau like uh so bad it's good type of character nice dave i have an update from a listener oh great i read it yeah let's hear it all right they didn't leave their name but they said i was listening to the episode 485 intro and you pondered what company has to be multi-region and multi-cloud i work at jp morgan in the payment side handling card transactions and the like. We back up multiple dump trucks of unmarked bills to our cloud providers every month. Yes. I suppose that's fair. If there's so many dollars riding

on each individual transaction, then the value of each individual one is probably worth a bunch of that, a bunch of those unmarked bills. Yeah. And you forward many of those dollars just directly onto your cloud providers. Yep. Such is life. Dave, should I read our first question? Let's do Okay, this is from a listener named, AWS multi-region is not real multi-region. Ask me how I know. Sounds like hard-won wisdom. All right. We've recently acquired some bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new grads.

What have you found to be the most efficient way to onboard new grads into development roles? How has it changed, if at all, since the advent of LLMs? i want to make sure my new grad crushing machine is operating as smoothly as possible considering the recent advancements in developer tooling those new grads won't crush themselves who's gonna crush the new grads in this new era oh goodness yeah if you're assuming they're talking to llms a lot you just need to provide them some prompt that makes the llm the new grad crushing machine okay like refusing to give information until you've spent hours banging your head against the wall and then it will give the

info yeah or just really snarky and rude it doesn't hit the same from an llm though it's sort of like a fun party trick instead of a thing you actually feel they will be mean to you if you tell them be really mean to me or be really harsh in your feedback or criticism but it's not it's surface level it's not real yeah yeah but that could be part of it right as part of your onboarding please insert this into your llm steering document of choice whatever that is and then i just uh i just had this image of an llm you telling it to be really mean to you and then it's saying you're absolutely right in my experience it has like two layers of meanness and then if you push back twice then it falls back to you're absolutely right oh really yeah it wraps around to niceness

yeah you're like get meaner you're absolutely right that wasn't mean enough i'm sorry i'm so sorry i'll obsequiously be so mean to you oh boy so what are we finding the new ways to onboard new grads who's hiring new grads that's what i want to know sorry we just hired a junior engineer oh did you it's been very interesting yeah a couple think they're on their second month now. Nice. You were thinking that might not happen at your company for a while. Yeah. And then look at me. I turned it on. I ate my words. Yeah, you did. It was an interesting hiring cycle. We interviewed a lot of senior people and didn't really find anybody we loved and then found a junior engineer that we really loved.

And it's great. Decided to accept all the trade-offs involved in that. So you were going for senior, but ended up junior. Yeah. I will tell you, like you have probably seen as an experienced engineer junior engineers are very susceptible to the llm enabling you to do stuff you should not do yeah and they have much less judgment or taste or experience to be able to step back and say wait we shouldn't keep going down this route yeah they don't have the scar tissue yeah and and i find myself falling into that trap sometimes of it's just addicting to say oh and can you do this and okay we found this problem with the thing you did can you do this instead to fix the problem you found and and and even then i still sometimes fall down that

trap but if you don't know anything about the code base if you haven't worked in large code bases before industrial code bases with their warts if you don't have the business context it's much harder to know whoa this pr i made is absolutely maybe i can click in the ui and it works and it is just absolutely the wrong approach so that's one of the negative sides of lms with junior engineers but the positive side is it's also so much easier to ask why does this code work how it does yeah tell me about this portion of the architecture and get an instant at your fingertips answer you gotta still vet it then apply some judgment to it but i i think it's if you can get in the door it's probably easier to be effective as a junior engineer now than it ever has been

Yeah, like the activation energy to just start, especially into an existing code base, where you're like, I have no idea where anything is here. You now have a concierge who can figure that out in record time. Yeah. This is, I guess, assuming that your workplace embraces LLMs and puts some effort into making them useful in your code base. It's not for free, certainly. That's a whole other topic. But if you're generally using LLMs in your engineering team in some way to try to be effective, then I think you should be able to see productive output from a junior engineer faster than you ever have. whether that's translating to them having a theory of the code base and the problem and the business domain yeah that's still an open question like are they going to learn slower and just get more done without understanding it i don't know i would love to ask you this question does your new grad who just did the sorry junior engineer i'm in an assumption about graduating here did this person come from a computer science program they're a they're a career changer so not a new grad but new junior engineer oh well the question i was going to ask which you can't

answer but i would love you to try since you can act like an llm now is uh our llm is actually an important part of computer science curriculum now or are they like verboten this person went through a it wasn't a boot camp it was uh what did they call it it was almost like a trade school for software engineering so it was a few years long okay yeah and they said the first couple of years they didn't touch llms at all and then the last year they did start to talk about them and use them i haven't actually talked to them in detail about what it involved but they did at least have some exposure to them as part of their curriculum i would love to hear that because i think it would be a great disservice to send someone through a training program for software

development and not have llms be part of it it just seems like such a useful tool i think there are some other perspectives of people who maybe hate them and think they're bad for the universe who also think maybe you're you're i don't know you you have to learn it by hand to be effective but i feel like every time that comes up in any problem domain ever the answer is no you don't yes you you you lose something that you you would have had if you went through this manual approach but also nobody does it so but at what cost all right well that's interesting yeah i mean i kind of want to make a comment about the industry in general right now but maybe i could i could implicitly make this comment by asking you how many other junior engineers did you talk to in

your job search very few okay like you were because you were targeting more senior people right yeah we were targeting more senior people we generally filtered them out if they made it through i mean there was a ton of fraud or i don't know fraud is the right term i don't know if it's legal a ton of people that appeared to be misrepresenting their experience and or their location and or fake resume employment status and immigration i don't know it was just full of nonsense so yeah i definitely experienced that but back back to the question of onboarding i haven't i have uh let's think here i haven't really onboarded someone new in the last year or two But I actually am struggling to think of how our onboarding program would really have changed all that much for new grads compared to a few years ago, other than to say we have these extra AI tools that are at your disposal and baked into our processes now.

One thing I was worried about is one failure mode for junior engineers is they don't jump in enough. They don't just try stuff. They don't ask questions. They kind of sit in silence because they're worried about not knowing what to do or feeling a little paralyzed or worried about looking dumb or something like that. And I was a bit worried that LLMs would maybe enable that even because maybe you don't want to look dumb to a person. So you ask an LLM instead and you just sort of never raise your questions with the team or interact in a way that might expose your lack of knowledge to the team. This junior junior has not done that. It's been great.

They've both learned stuff from LLMs and been very willing to say, wait, what did you mean when you said that thing? Or I don't know. Tell me the context here. yeah but there's probably something around that of it could be easier to sink into a void of not communicating as much because you can just communicate with this computer instead yeah are you seeing that yet no no i haven't seen that i guess i'm just saying it's a new danger where before if you did that you'd be very clearly just floundering you wouldn't be able to get anything done yeah maybe you could still output code but you you don't develop as close of a

connection with the team because you just want to talk to the computer that doesn't judge you instead of the team member that might raise an eyebrow yeah at how dumb your question is to be clear i i don't think a team member would right they would expect to have a lot of questions that yeah yeah i don't know you just don't there's obviously will be many questions but i i know it's a fear that many people have many new grads have especially yeah yeah fair enough that was a fear i never really had i think i'm missing one of those like survival genes and so i'm willing to ask a lot of stupid questions really excitedly so i how's it changed at all in the advent of lms yeah i think i'm struggling to split a power apart onboarding at a company and just onboarding

to your career in general it also depends on how much onboarding you have already do you have any formal curriculum or process or expectations? If you're a startup, probably no. But if you've acquired some, which means more than one new grads, you're probably not just a brand new startup. Yeah. They don't really have the capacity to absorb that many junior engineers at once. So there's probably something, there's probably some curriculum you go through, but. Yeah. I mean, depending on the size of the company, right? Well, I mean, I'm kind of thinking I'm ready to leave the llm aspect of this question uh behind and i have some info i could share about how i do onboarding for new grads and new hires in general that might be used sure probably the best

onboarding i ever experienced as the new hire was at a at amazon when they gave me a launch plan document and it was just a giant checklist of all the things that that they wanted me to do and it was organized very nicely it said here are things you should do on your first day here's what you should do during your first week and then here's what you should do during your first, I think, like 12 weeks. And the manager would take a template that was corporate provided and the manager would customize it for the individual team. And one of the best things that they did that I still do today, I've taken it to two other companies, is I will give you, if I'm the manager and you're the onboardee, I will give you a list of people that I think you

need to set up some one-on-one time with and go sit down and talk to for 30 minutes and some questions you can ask. And it is so helpful. Like, for example, one of the questions that was on my Amazon launch plan was go to each of these people and ask them, what does success in your role look like? And I got like a perspective from four or five different people, including people who were less senior than me, including managers of other teams, including my peers on other teams. So like technical leads on other teams. And the the breadth of what how people define success was so incredibly helpful and empowering for me because now i know i just it was explicit what people's expectations were for me and i just never wondered you know like oh i

wonder if i'm stepping out of line here it's like no so i know someone wants me to do this so i'm going to do it it was great like i really absolutely loved it so i would say any onboarding plan that doesn't have a list of people you should meet and some sample questions you should ask is incomplete especially for a new grad because new grads they just they don't know what's normal and what's not and so telling them hey i want you to go sit down with this person for 30 minutes and here's some sample questions you should ask of course feel free to ask others it's like oh great now i know that's a norm that i can follow and i don't have to be afraid about approaching someone and taking some of their time because my boss told me to yeah i like that an important part

of our onboarding plan here was we don't do a lot of personal metrics around productivity or velocity but in this case we absolutely did said this many tickets a week this many prs a week this many reviews a week because i think as a junior you don't have as much i don't know clear you don't have as much context to know what's a normal range of expectations exactly and the more clear you can be there's sort of this trade-off of like explicit and clear versus kind of controlling and not leaving as much room for creativity or trust. I think clear and explicit over trust is a good trade-off for a junior engineer.

Yeah, especially one that just came out of a college or longer program, because you got to imagine they're going to have been in this world where they are given a course syllabus for every class they took. There's deadlines all throughout the semester so they know exactly where they're supposed to be

spending their time at any given moment. To be dropped into a development team with no clarity on what's expected exactly for the first, I don't know, a few months or something, that can be really disorienting. Yeah. And listen, maybe you work at a megacorp where it's just so many moving parts, it's hard to ship stuff. That's also an important expectation to set, for better or for worse. Hey, you should not expect this to go to prod anytime soon. We do this many deploys exactly or maybe it's more healthy and you can make changes and shepherd them into real users in a reasonable amount of time yeah and i remember after six weeks

at amazon i remember being very frustrated with myself that i hadn't made any big contributions to the code or to the product and i sat down with the principal engineer and i was like hey i just gotta ask like is it normal to have not really made a big technical like code contribution in the first six weeks he was like oh that's normal in the first 12 weeks i was like oh thank goodness because i'm sitting here going my last company i was shipping code to production like actual features within the first week or two you know so yeah it's just having that expectation is really helpful hmm well have we answered the question i think so i can't emphasize enough how important it is to give new grads a launch plan or some kind of onboarding document like a checklist that they

can go through and there's a ton of stuff you can do to make this really good i'm sure a lot of people have written about this. And I've seen this done like a lot of different ways at different companies, you know, everything from having an onboarding buddy, who's your designated question asker, to having a list of software that you should have installed on your computer, to I already mentioned the meeting list to like what your expectations are for when you should have your first PR delivered or your first ticket completed. You know, there's just so much you can do there. But I think that it's really, really important just to have that all written down. It's so comforting. It really helps the person do their best work. Yeah, that's all I got. All right.

best of luck you crush many grads yeah let us know how many grads you crush all right all right shall i read the next one oh yes please okay this comes from a listener named tasso tasso tasso i said it three ways hopefully one of them is right i accept all of those okay if all been accepted okay early in my career i was all in on startups then i spent seven years in big companies in leadership roles i learned a lot but the politics and the pace were so slow that at some point, I'm pretty sure geological processes were moving faster than our release cycle. So I finally flipped some metaphorical fingers and quit. Since then, I've been interviewing almost exclusively with startups, except Google,

where I somehow ended up with an offer on a team that I would genuinely enjoy. You've both bounced between big tech and startups. If you were in my shoes, how would you think about choosing between the two? Great question. This is a good question. It's a very multidimensional space with many trade-offs, but I think you can summarize the trade-off as lots of freedom and chaos over a smaller total market size and kind of smaller impact that the business that you work in has a smaller impact in the world, but you have a much bigger impact on the business

versus the opposite of that. Lots of order and probably rigor. There's still plenty of chaos at big companies, but many of the problems are not, you're solving a problem a way that someone else has decided and you're a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the overall company's impact, but the company's impact is gigantic on the world.

Yeah. I wonder if you do the math on the ratios of your contribution to the company's overall impact if both of these scenarios, you actually end up doing about the same? Probably depends a lot. I mean, if you're on the Gemini team or whatever, then you're probably having a pretty big impact

on the company as a whole and the world. If you're on the team that puts checkboxes in some screen somewhere that I've never heard of, I'm sure there are many at Google. Somewhere deep in the GCD console. Maybe a little bit less. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to make an assumption here before we go any further, which is that, yeah, this person has worked in big companies, so startups, then big companies, and now considering startups again. But I am going to assume that these big companies were not big tech companies.

There's a big difference between working at like a J.P. Morgan, like we just talked about, which is a big company, but not strictly a tech company, or even a big company like Chevrolet or General Motors or something. You know, like Chevrolet is not a company. I just realized this General Motors. Anyway, there's a big difference between working at a big company that's not tech focused and not a tech product, first and foremost, and working at a tech company like Google. And I would say, if none of the big companies you've worked at already are like a Google, like one of the big fang style tech companies, go for it. Absolutely take the job. Do the Google. You will learn so much, even if you will not have a big impact, which you probably won't. Even if you will be totally boxed in by process and already established guidelines on how

to do things, which you will. even if all those things are true i think that working at one of these big fang tech companies for a few years is a great experience really really good you will see how things are done you will increase the scope of what you think is possible to understand and you will come away with just so much valuable knowledge that i think it's absolutely worth it and i would take that over the startup all day that's interesting i didn't expect you to come down as strongly on on one side but it all depends like i said on the on the previous experience like you've never worked at a google style company yeah you know like an amazon a facebook meta netflix etc gotta do it i'm i'm

thinking about this because i i have not i worked at a giant company but it was not a tech company strictly i mean but you were pretty tech forward in that area of that company yeah and and they tried very hard to convince everyone that they actually were a tech company but they they were not but i work at i've worked at startups since then but i want to go back you do i don't know Oh, I wouldn't want to go back. No, I'm asking. I'm just saying, like, if you haven't yet had that experience, I think it's really valuable to have once. I personally don't want to go back to big tech.

I love working at startups more, but I'm so glad that I did. I think I agree with that, that I would not want to be in startups right now without having gone to big company tech-ish. How would you define it? I think what you did was close enough. I would probably round up to a big tech. Yeah. For what's next, I mean, it's such a personal question that also depends so much on the specific startups you're looking at because there's an enormous amount of variance.

There's a lot of variance in your life experience working at Google as well because it's such a big org, but I think it's still much smaller than the variance between one random startup and another random startup because they're so small, they're going to be in such wildly different problem spaces probably true i think it's probably more likely that you will be able to pick a problem space you are interested in at a startup just because you can find a company potentially that is working on that problem i guess i don't usually find my opportunities that way i sort of go the other direction from who who will have me and then convince myself that i'm interested in the thing they're working on but again it also depends on the your situation in

life are you looking for stability are you looking for you you can certainly work an insane amount of hours at big tech yeah but i think you'll feel less like the world rides on your shoulders than you would at a startup for good or for ill and you might be able to have a better work-life balance if you're good at pushing back against the normal pressures to do more that are going to be there big tech that are going to be around promotion and advancement and reviews and i know they're still gonna want you to work really hard but yeah and there will be frustrations i think it's it's easier to just look around and say wait there are like 80 000 other people here surely it doesn't all write on me not taking vacation yeah this week yeah it's true it's true i think i'm just

waffling i don't know this feels like the ultimate it depends question i'm surprised you're so hesitant on the google opportunity i guess i'm i'm looking less at seven years in big companies and leadership roles doesn't specifically say big tech so i yeah i mean that's my assumption here if you've already done the big tech i would pass yeah go do what you love clearly you're drawn to these startups like you absolutely hate these big company processes and stuff and i get it like that's cool like i remember even at amazon i felt like we were moving too slow and it was funny because managers would tell me this is the fastest i've ever moved in my whole career and i was like this is the slowest i have ever moved in my whole career because i had done startups for the last

year several years but it was still great like i still learned so much and i i would not trade it i loved it i'm so glad i did it i just you know i like startups now i think you are more likely to make a lot of money at google than at a start oh yeah it's more guaranteed right like the startup could make you a lot of money or none but it probably won't yeah exactly it's like do you want to do you want to roll a hundred sided die and if you get a one you're gonna make you know 10 million dollars or do you want to roll a a zero sided die and you're guaranteed to make several hundred grand every year yeah i also would examine why why you left startups in the first place and what you miss about them yeah i think i just like feeling i like feeling like

problems are mine to solve yeah and for better for worse my personality is if there's a lot of rules around i'm going to try and follow those rules if someone said this is how we solve this problem here because we've had a thousand engineers work through this already yeah probably just going to do that thing but if it's the first time a company has ever dealt with a problem because it's a startup then it's much more freeing it's i don't know i'm not going to just chuck the flip the process table over if it's if it's a well-tread path so yeah i i enjoy that a lot and and i find that at startups which is probably why i'm going to stick around at startups for a while if it wear my shoes but if i if i were in your shoes i would be me and i would work at a startup i think

it's still me just different shoes but i don't know what your shoes all involve yeah probably they're just basic shoes they don't change the way you think about anything you know that's a really funny thing i did it never occurred to me that metaphor is kind of terrible if you were in my shoes i'm like you mean if i just put on your shoes like that's now it doesn't change anything maybe my feet would hurt if they're the wrong size yeah i still like startups next time someone says that if i were in your shoes i'd be like they wouldn't look good on you but that wouldn't change anything about you

i think uh offer on a team i genuinely enjoy i don't know that sounds pretty good yeah i'm saying take it take the offer look i mean what's the worst case scenario here you spend a couple years at google and you're like actually this wasn't for me but i made all this horrible money you know like this gigantic paycheck that google's famous for now go work for a startup and now you're just two years later but you have all this money it's like options now you know it's just great so i don't know i don't see the downside yeah it's it's tough when the comparison is google or maybe some startups yeah and yeah it's not clear if you have offers from those startups or what they are also not like it's not clear what stage they are too right like you

know we could be talking like seed stage you're person number two or we could be talking it's series c and your person number 50 yeah the the variance in outcome is certainly a lot higher in a startup both for good and for ill yeah and i think your average financial outcome is certainly going to be better at google but also you get to learn fun new i feel like at a at a giant megacorp there are lots of disasters caused by the difficulties of working with very large groups of people and lots of dysfunction around that and there's there's a lot of work to be done exploring that problem space and a startup there are a lot of disasters caused by no one even knew this was a thing at all or this is the first time we've ever had a customer that wanted to do this

thing and it turns out it broke like there's lots of uh brand new things i guess i'm just repeating what I already said and and I just find that more satisfying overall so I think I'm I'm just coming down on the opposite side of Dave that's a good place to be usually that way we cover all our bases so no one can say the show advised them wrong yeah what do you mean wrong we gave you both the answers yeah no no matter what you do you took our advice that's right or didn't you know I don't know if it worked out badly no matter what you do it's not our fault yeah exactly I mean this is do the other thing this is a legal strategy yes we told you what not to do and what to do and you did the opposite yeah and it worked out badly for you all right yeah did we answer this question

i think so i think i've waffled enough yeah i think you've you've not answered the question long enough yep my work here is done what can people do if they want their own questions also not answered if you'd like jameson to not answer your question go to soft skills the audio and click the ask a question button which i'm going to go just change the link that says ask a question answer is not guaranteed anyway if you'd like to do that click the ask a question button and fill out our form thank you so much to everyone who does that we absolutely love hearing from you so many of you have written in questions that honestly it's a little it's emotionally overwhelming but i want you to keep doing it it's like stockholm syndrome at this

point i've fallen in love with my my uh what is it called my kidnappers that's not the right way to anyway we love your questions in this case the question askers are the kidnappers i'm trying to make sure i understand this metaphor correctly they have my heart hostage let's just put it that way ah yes well that that sounds like not too bad yeah it's great honestly it's wonderful i love them even though they cause me great emotional distress when i read your challenging situations that's what love is it is all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week