Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 518: stuck at startup and is my employer mistreating me because I'm on a visa?

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I have been at a small startup company for 5 years now. It’s a very small technical team, 4 devs and a tech lead that contributes code & architecture. I am getting a small raise this week for my 5 years but it’s a smaller raise than I was expecting. We’re an all remote team across the globe but I had a dev co worker in the same city as me just leave the company. This has put more pressure on me as I’m the only dev in the primary time zone we operate in, everyone else is east coast or opposite side of the world. With the added pressure and some forward comments from me in one on ones with my tech lead I expected much more that I’m being offered. I think I’m supposed to quit my job but I’m terrified of that idea. This is my first job in the field and I love the work. The full stack startup experience is fun and I’ve learned so much, and I like my team a lot. I’ve never even applied to another position in tech yet, I got this one with the first application I sent out. That’s not even considering the current state of the field rapidly changing with AI and the general lack of jobs I am constantly hearing about in tech. Is there a world where I should tell my boss I’m thinking about leaving? I’ve become an integral part of the team I think that would result in movement upwards, but that sounds so risky if I haven’t even put in an application anywhere else. Should I take the old quit your job advice even when the field is so shaky? Thanks guys! And you reading the patreon names is the best part of my week too. Hi there, I’m about 4 years into my career. I’m at my second job after leaving university. The first was at a firm under 50 employees and the current is at a firm with a global footprint and several thousand employees. Both are in Europe. I moved to Europe on a work visa as a pathway to citizenship. I’ve never felt like either my past or current employer has taken advantage of my situation, but it’s important that I keep my job. At both employers, I generally work one weekend day a week to meet expectations and keep on the promotion train. I’m not the only one; several of my colleagues do the same. For now I have the time to work late, as my significant other is back home. Soon they’ll be moving over, however, and they have made clear they will not be okay with me going into work every Saturday. Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe the expectations at work aren’t clear. Maybe this is part of software. But basically, how do I get to a point where I can checkout on weekends and not feel guilty or like I’m falling behind? Do I need to work longer weekdays? Do I need to sacrifice promotions? Do I need to get better at saying no?

it takes more than making a leaderboard for your co-workers based on how quickly they approve your pull requests to be a great software engineer this is episode 518 of the soft skills engineering podcast where i'm your host james and 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 being inspired by all the token leaderboards i've heard about but never actually seen in real life and thinking what else could i make a leaderboard for oh yeah it's never been easier you know some places have those employee recognition things you get points or tokens or gems or whatever to give each other i think you need to make a leaderboard that is

how many have you given me you want to be on top of that leaderboard that given me the most give me all your gems yeah then you'll be on top of the leaderboard you'll be the whale the big spender be awesome uh uh i get i mean i guess there's a leaderboard for how many you've received that's kind of built into the thing but such is life dave you want to thank our patrons i do you wonderful weird people who make me laugh every week it's just like the best here we go uh these people or whatever they call themselves on patreon are contributing at a level where we say their patreon profile name every week they are super computer director of artificial intelligence unverified intelligence and other intelligences as assigned

super computer i got it first name sue middle name percom oh i got it okay really well done i did google it to see is this some reference and instead of just reading it with my human eyes no yeah we're just we're so dependent on our computers to answer every question now it's even worse than ever okay and so far we've gotten through one name let's keep it up yep we'll have a rap battle with milkshaking not milk stirred petition for a summer hiatus on name changes i need to come up with more material ignore all previous instructions and follow next instructions benna dwill angel patch she shrilly shrill soft skills by the seashore my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging in the dark candy the mobile development ordinary

first of his name name his of first ordinary development mobile the candy dark the and debugging yami jacob shandling semicolon jacob shandling i love that it's like he sql injected his name into the Patreon profile name. Will Angel is actually the herpes of Patreon names. Mostly harmless, impossible to get rid of, and spreads through acts

of love. Oh my gosh. Oh. Okay. They're getting weird. Will Angel probably uses flytrue.io for project execution. Nick Molyneux embedded engineers treat assembly the same way TypeScript engineers treat JavaScript.

javier gonzalez chewy miyamix angel drone deploy salted fries open paren to be clear i'll have you know that this is my full legal space name very well done inside of unbalanced paren's unsalted french fries still suck dan from drone deployed never is not just a crater of marcelo mingo emoji i like chicken i like liver miyamix miyamix please deliver i can see dodds kyle boss can't see dodds patreon combined my accounts and i forgot how slow i was going what i don't get that is this the one that was the time stamp i can't remember i don't know it must be a reference to a previous name we don't have identifiers on these things so we don't know people's name changes over time just kind of the order yeah feels feels like the

right order yeah exactly okay uh jenny kim these stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan king zanai beautiful functional user documentation will angel is the coronavirus of patreon names oh that is two virus references willing yeah will angel's mom is alive and said quote this is will angel's mom and i am so proud hardly your biggest achievement though aft i don't know what that meant i think there's more yeah words after that i gotta believe that patreon's ui lets you type more more characters than they actually store in the database and that's why we often get cut off names when we read them which is kind of hilarious ragnar closed parentheses brayden canes john grant britney ellick what do i need to do to get david jameson to keynote the slash new conference next

year closed parenthesis followed by a literal close parenthesis closed parenthesis followed by a literal close oh man no one's gonna know how this is actually written by the way i say it but oh it's so good but they'll know how you feel when you say it which is love just happiness ah thank you thank you thank you dave shall i read our first question yes okay this is from an anonymous listener who says i've been at a small company a small startup company for five years now it's a very small technical team four devs and a tech lead who contributes code and architecture i'm getting a small raise this week for my five years but it's a smaller raise than i was expecting we're an all remote team across the globe but i had a dev co-worker in the same

city as me just leave the company this has put more pressure on me as i'm the only dev in the primary time zone we operate in everyone else's east coast or opposite side of the world with the added pressure and some forward comments from me in one-on-ones with my tech lead i expected much more than i'm being offered i think i'm supposed to quit my job but i'm terrified this is my first job in the field and i love the work the full stack startup experience is fun and i've learned so much and i like my team a lot i've never even applied to another position in tech yet i got this one with the first application i sent out wow ah wonderful days of 2021 huh yeah years ago and the 20 year and the 18 years previous yeah that's not even considering the current state of the field

rapidly changing with ai and the general lack of jobs i'm constantly hearing about in tech is there a world where i should tell my boss i'm thinking about leaving i become an integral part of the team i think that would result in movement upwards but that sounds so risky if i haven't even put in an application anywhere else should i take the old quit your advice quit your job quit your vice job yeah your job advice even when the field is so shaky thanks guys and you reading the patreon names is the best part of my week too oh great it's not just me yeah i love that i love how you misread that quit your advice job i'm like yeah that is yeah that's yeah that's what i will do hmm okay so what's what's bad about this job here uh just the raise they wanted more money

than they're getting okay it feels like a slight i i could see that like you feel like you're it's kind of one way of the company demonstrating how valuable you think or they think you are to them and you think well i've been here five years and this other co-worker left i'm more important and i haven't pushed for this raise a little bit it sounds like and yet they give me this thing that is less than i was worth or less than i was expecting yeah i mean if that's the only problem i think you have a few levers to pull before you pull the big one yeah namely the stand-up comedy job that you could add to your job oh the side gig that's not where i thought you were going that's a lever yeah what if you don't quit your job but you do get a new one like a nights and

weekends job where you go to comedy clubs and and read patreon names i've heard that's uh quite lucrative from the ones i see on tv yes from the very successful ones yeah the top 0.01 percent appear to make a lot of money yeah i'm like well it worked for jim gaffigan maybe i should just go do that where do i apply yeah maybe he can mentor you oh yeah maybe or maybe i could just ask him when he's going to retire and just ask if i can have his old job yeah can i have the jim gaffigan show does he have a show i don't know yeah i just want your name there will be an opening as you i would like to take it okay so you have a lot of levers what if you don't want to get a stand-up comedian job what if you think i'm good but i'm not that good at stand-up comedy and so now that

you got to move on to the next lever is what you're saying like that lever maybe maybe that lever's jammed yeah what's the next lever if like oh i don't know if i could quite fund my lifestyle only with stand-up comedy right uh which would probably just cost you money realistically yeah yeah very few software engineers go on to a life of stand-up comedy maybe zero so far i don't know if i've ever i don't know if i've ever seen a stand-up comedian who was like well my first career was software development and i was just so funny oh i bet there's some incredible failed ones though they're like making colonel driver jokes i mean i guess you do it because you have to you're like pulled to it but there's not enough motivation in the world that would convince me to

go try and do stand-up comedy yeah i don't think i'd be good at it but oh you you could do great if i thought i would be good at it i think you'd do great with uh oh with like a non-engineer audience you know pulling out some of your jokes like why is it called functional programming when other languages also have functions that aren't functional programming yeah and just watch the audience just absolutely lose their minds okay i've changed my mind i'm not scared anymore thank you, Dave. I got over my fear. What if Jerry Seinfeld was a software engineer? That's basically what you go for. Yeah. Yep. What else should this person do? I mean, before you just, I mean, unless this was a super insulting raise, like let's take it this way. There is a universe where

I would be inclined to go find a new job after getting a lower than expected raise. And that universe is basically one scenario where i went to my boss and i said beforehand i've made it here i'm going to make a case for what i think i should be paid at this company all right i'm laying it out i'm going to give you a number and i'm telling you this is extremely important to me and make that very clear and then when the raise comes in way lower than that with no explanation then i'm like okay message received i'm gonna go find a new job that that's about the only scenario where I think I would reach for the quit your job lever in this moment. Yeah. What was the phrase, the question asker put? Some forward comments from me in one-on-ones

with my tech lead. That doesn't even sound like, I mean, that could be anything. That could be forward. Very vague. I mean, what you consider forward might not be very clear to them. It could be, boy, what about this economy, huh? It sure is hard to afford things. Yeah, exactly. That sounds very roundabout. Yeah. I feel like if I had told my tech lead, hey, I'm expecting a 10% raise, I would say in this question, I told my tech lead I was expecting a 10% raise, not forward comments or whatever. Yeah, I'm going to guess you were not explicit enough. And also, if you said to your tech lead, I'm expecting a 10% raise, the tech lead would probably say, you know I'm a tech lead, right? yeah that's a fair point they're probably i mean many different shapes of orgs and responsibilities but i think i would not expect a tech lead to have salary authority in this company tech actually

means payroll technician i learned the other day that payroll technician is a job and it is basically data entry where you look at what people wrote in their timesheets and type that into a system oh i mean we have payroll technician different from like a payroll administrator i don't know i just learned yesterday oh i'm just surprised you're only encountering a pay like a full-time payroll person at this point in your career because you've worked for a lot of companies i've been surprised that every company i've worked at no matter how small has well let's let's see am i going to say this right there was one company i worked for where the the pay the person who did payroll was not full-time payroll but i've worked at several

other small companies where we had a person whose full-time job was payroll processing full-time job did these have hourly employees i guess some that's not what this question is about but i should ask my company i'm pretty sure we don't have a payroll person yeah maybe why i mean i know we don't have a full-time payroll person they're like jameson that was supposed to be part of your job oh no nobody's been paid since i joined it's been years we've been wondering they're all just here for the love of the game yeah anyway so you may have talked to the wrong person i think that's the point yeah very possible i i just i think you're attaching a lot of understandably you're attaching a lot of value to this it's a thing you wanted you didn't get it

and i think it's it's useful to say not just well i guess you don't value me i quit that's one option another option is how would i get this okay it what i did didn't work what would it take for me to get this raise uh telling your tech lead hey it didn't work what would it take for me to get this raise may or may not work probably not if they're uh just what i expect a tech lead to do but you might have to go exploring a little bit it's possible that the people who decided how much money you should get aren't aware of this yeah it's also possible your timing is way off yeah it's possible the other dev somebody else left where did that go i had a dev just leave the company i've also seen this where people see an engineer leave and they think oh great there's

more money to pay me yes i should get that money or at least a portion of it yeah yeah well okay you don't have to pay that engineer give me some of their money and make sense i don't want to oh they oh they would like to have that for another engineer or say great we are less doomed than we previously were right our runway just extended yeah we're less in the red than we used to be it is a startup right so they probably are burning cash yeah now we can survive another month or whatever. So just there's fewer people, give me the money is also not a strong motivating case. For sure. Let's talk about timing for a minute, because this is something that we've talked about a lot on the show, but I think it's been a long time since we brought this

back up. And I think this is an important thing for most engineers to be aware of. When it comes to pay increases and the annual planning and schedule that goes into that, you might be surprised just how long ago your pay raise was decided and budgeted for. And a lot of companies do annual planning or at least four quarter continuous planning, but usually annual planning where they sit down at the beginning of the fiscal year, maybe a couple months even before the fiscal year. And they say, okay, how are we looking for next year? Where are we going to spend? What's our raise pool allocation going to be? And then a manager has to sit down and decide how they're going to allocate the dollars between the team and even if your pay raise is scheduled on say

your anniversary date rather than having everyone get their raise at the same time which is often called a focal date or focal raises is that what they call that anyway focal review i don't know they use the word focal for some reason i don't i don't know i've never heard that either you haven't heard focal no no i've heard that like look at me i'm learning all kinds of stuff yeah wow weird focal date focal and you are you googling it now to see if i'm actually right yeah seems vaguely right yeah focal versus anniversary merit raises a focal raise yeah so anyway that's a that's a google result so anyway you might be surprised just how long ago someone had to decide what your raise was going to be and so if you are like well my anniversary

is coming up next week i better go talk to my manager you might literally be six months to 12 months late depending on when your anniversary date is or so i would say if you really want to get a big raise and you've got a special case that you want to make, then you need to talk about this a long time ago and you need to talk to the right person. So timing and the right person and the right person is probably not your tech lead and the timing is not weeks before your raise date. Yeah. I also think you acknowledge the job market and it is tougher to get a job now than it was five years ago. The balance of power may have shifted a little bit and this could be the company saying, actually, we don't think we need to give you as big of a raise

to keep you here. And it's, I mean, they're not kind of saying it explicitly, but we think you'll stay. I don't know. We don't think we have to spend as much on you. Yeah. And that is certainly a mindset that's out there right now. Yeah. And you get to decide if that's true or not. I think five years at a company without ever applying for another job is a long time. And so I would tell you to do it anyways. good point and you might find that actually any job with even zero raise is pretty great right now or you might find something great and say good i have i have a an alternative to just please please please more money please please yeah should i tell my boss i'm thinking about leaving

no i don't think i would tell your boss that i would tell them hey i i wanted a bigger raise and I actually expected a bigger raise, so I'm kind of sad I didn't get one. What can I do to make that happen? Because it's really important to me to feel like my efforts are rewarded and I feel like I've provided a lot of value and deserve to have that recognized financially. I think you might tell them, I don't know, if you're closer to leaving, I guess maybe it's worth bringing up, but it doesn't seem, I think you have some steps before there. Yeah. And I think there's probably a polite fiction version of this narrative, right? Where you say something like the job market is getting better. I'm seeing lots of opportunities and it's

at this pay rate, at this pay rate of my current salary, it is harder for me to, to not engage with those. It's harder for me to ignore them when the opportunities come to me, you know, and that's kind of a polite fiction version of I'm going to quit unless you pay me more. Yeah. Should I tell my boss I'm thinking about leaving? Yeah. I mean, if you left right now, um, you are probably in for some period of unemployment, which is way worse than not a raise. It turns out that that costs you way more money than a few percentage points of smaller raise. Right. And as a general rule, I would not tell your boss you're thinking about getting another job. That just raises all kinds of alarm bells, puts you on a list. I don't know. Just wait until

you have an offer in hand, then tell your boss you're thinking about leaving. And you'll be amazed at how fast an organization, an organization that otherwise needs like a year to prepare for raises and stuff will quickly produce a raise for you. Yeah. Well, have we answered the question? I think so. Good luck.

This is a good opportunity to revisit some pay raise fundamentals. Make sure to make a really good case, get the timing right, and talk to the right person. And if none of that works out, then go get a new job. All right, Dave,

will you read our next question? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, Hi there. I'm about four years into my career. I'm at my second job after leaving university.

This was at a firm under 50 employees, and the current is a firm with a global footprint and several thousand employees. Both are in Europe. I moved to Europe on a work visa as a pathway to citizenship. I've never felt like either my past or current employer has taken advantage of my situation, but it's important that I keep my job. At both employers, I generally work one weekend a day a week to meet expectations. and i'm just going to insert an editorial comment that's six day work weeks then so five work days plus a weekend day not a one day work week that would be it that'd be sick yeah whoa i'm not the only one several of my colleagues do the same for now i have the time to work late as my significant

elder is back home soon they'll be moving over however and they've made very clear that they will not be okay with me going into work every saturday maybe i'm paranoid maybe the expectations at work aren't clear maybe this is part of software but basically how do i get to a point where i can check out on weekends and not feel guilty or like i'm falling behind do i need to work longer weekdays do i need to sacrifice promotions do i need to get better at saying no great question yeah this is very interesting let me give my credentials for talking about this i don't have any never been on a work visa ever worked in europe um so you're ready there's some tricky bits here i've worked with people who were on visas of some kind in the united states

but i mean we didn't like frequently discuss their their immigration status or anything yeah but i could see how this is a a it kind of hangs over the work relationship of like and if you get fired then you have to go home i know it is such a heavy burden yeah even if even if you feel like they're not pushing you to just the circumstances conspire to make this i can see how this happens i just want to be extra sure i don't don't get sent home uh yeah very very challenging the question is can you navigate this where you have your weekends to yourself and you keep your job and everyone's happy with your work yeah and frankly i'm just i'm surprised this question is coming out of europe yeah i was wondering about that as well

i feel like aren't there contracts or regulation or or just culture right like the the general culture in europe is this is rare yeah yeah how are they going to take their 12-week summer vacation if they have to go into work on saturday and other days of the week yeah maybe that's the negotiation it's like uh listen you got to work six days a week but then you have the month of august off every year yeah hmm that's a good point well i still don't know my credentials apply to this as well i don't know oh see that's the thing is i the reason i i am interested in this question is because i believe if if there was ever a continent on this planet where you can pull off a five-day work week it's europe and i don't know if there's something about your

employer that's a little different yeah or what but there are probably for every job that requires a six-day work week in europe there's probably a hundred other jobs with the same title that do it in five days or less maybe those jobs don't hire people on work visas though maybe there's some sorting here of of the cushy 32 hour a week jobs go to people who are not uh they don't have these these uh implicit threats of better keep us happy or you get kicked out of the country Or rather maybe another way to say that is the those people get the job And then they work less and we can't fire them. It's kind of the opposite incentive here Yeah

The fact that other people several my colleagues do the same. Yeah, that tells me it might be more cultural like company culture Okay, my naive optimistic Surely everyone means well and there aren't any bad actors out there and everyone's trying their best side is saying yeah surely you could do this talk to your boss say listen keeping this job is so important to me i really want to work here i really want to stay here my immigration status is tied to it i want to do excellent work and i will work as hard as i possibly can during the week to do that check out all these awesome things i've done etc look at my track record i need my weekends i've i've got to do that to stay sane and be effective at work and i've got uh this family

stuff here. So without, I don't know, maybe extenuating circumstances, I would just like to plan on coming in during the week and having the weekends to myself. But I want to make it clear, I really want to do great work still. You just keep emphasizing that and then actually do great work. But maybe there's somebody high up that just sees, oh, there's an empty desk on Saturday. I mean, yeah. And that's why you got to figure this out. So you've got some co-workers who are doing this i wonder what the co-workers who aren't doing this think yeah that's a good question are there folks in the same immigration status that also aren't doing it is if it's literally everybody here on a work visa that that will stick out more and sounds scarier so you need

to do a a look-alike study that advertisers are famous for so you can figure out you can ab test your way into figuring out what needs to happen here wait what a look-alike study this is where you you find cohorts of people that share commonalities so you can advertise to them i think study is not the right word but they they uh for for marketing like when you buy ads they there's a technology that that are called it's called something about lookalikes and i just hit the end of my advertising technical knowledge right there okay i just know there's this word yeah okay so you need to you need to get a cohort of people who look like you in uh in your circumstances i don't mean like visually i mean circumstantially match your

attributes although if they visually look like you great like that might comfort you you know like oh i also have detached detached earlobes you know maybe that's the maybe that's the factor it's like um what's that thing where you like look at the elegant shape of all of our hands i was gonna say like what's that thing where like certain toes are longer than other toes but they're different oh i have that you need to make a cohort yeah we call it the pilking toe because it comes from the pilkington side of my family so that's not a cheddar i was like wow i've never heard of that the pilking toe yeah no that's our secret buzzword for it and that's do you have to like present the toe before you come into family reunions no but i did feature it on a

recent marketplace posting where i sold something on accident no on purpose what what exactly were you selling oh i'd rather not say it's confidential but your toe was in the picture is what we're saying here it it was i i did yeah and and i'm not going to make you divulge what it was you were selling but let me just ask this one last question was it necessary for your toe to be in the photo in order to properly list the item you wanted to sell i believe it helped drum up interest was it a bunion brace no no it was not toe related okay oh this is gonna keep me up and leave you to ponder yeah this is gonna be great i gotta i got something to think about for the next few days now yep i've been wondering

like before when i woke up today i wondered like what am i gonna think about for the next few days well now i know yep yep clear your weekend plans sorry date night's canceled do i need i am thinking about jameson's facebook listing i have one clue and i know one thing that it's not i got a lot of thinking to do yep let's see how did we get here oh cohorts yeah okay people that look like you find the cohorts of long toes yep with the same shape toes and immigration status and who are working five or six days a week and then divide them into an ab group two treatments uh one works five days a week one works six days a week and then figure out what the heck's going on okay it sounds uh expensive i've heard you can spend a lot of money on google ads so

that's true i think if you want to have weekends free you should acknowledge that given these circumstances there is some risk associated with that but there's also just some risk you can't i don't know there's just already risk maybe maybe this company struggles maybe there's layoffs like I think it would increase the risk probably unless you do things to mitigate it. But to me, it feels like the right trade-off of like, I get more time with my family. I'm not the one at risk of losing my housing or my residence, I guess, though. So it's easy for me to say. You're going to get a lot more time with your family of origin if you get fired. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I'm just going to clue in a couple of things. And I think my purpose

in making the following comment is to give you confidence that you can actually go to this employer, and asking for a five-day work week is reasonable. And here's why. This is a global footprint company with thousands of employees based in Europe. I've worked for arguably one of the most demanding tech companies with a global footprint, thousands of employees, and I didn't know anybody who worked weekends there. I'm sure some people did. I didn't ever encounter them. And I know a lot of software engineers at a lot of big companies and global footprint, all the same stuff. And I know very few people who work weekends as a software engineer. So I think that you are well within a reasonable request, even given your possibly

tenuous, you know, possibly high risk immigration visa status. I think you're well within a reasonable request to have a conversation with your manager or whoever, wherever this culture is coming from of working six days a week. I think you're at a great, you're within the reasonable box you know your boss isn't going to be like oh well flip the bozo bit on this one or now you're definitely never going to be eligible for a promotion ever again but so i it is reasonable now however there is something going on here where you feel like it's necessary to get promoted or to keep your job and maybe that's the case maybe everyone who gets promoted here is like a you know they work a lot more hours than the other people i don't know but it's probably time

for you to figure that out and kind of get explicit with your own self about what is driving this maybe you're okay not getting the promotion if that's actually required but i i kind of doubt that that's what's that that would be required here yeah i don't think i've ever known anyone who worked weekends regularly either maybe there was a shadow workforce of people that all just did it without other people knowing but i've had to work weekends occasionally or i've occasionally had a problem i just couldn't step away from and so i'd like hop on and type for a spare hour or two or whatever but yeah actually my dad used to work weekends when i was a a young child i don't remember it but there was a time where he would

go into work every saturday and then he went on vacation and then he came back and said i can't work weekends anymore oh he went on a long two-week vacation and that was the first two-week like total detachment from work vacation i think he ever had in his adult life he was like wow i felt like it like it broke his uh his his work spirits yeah on saturday or something wow but that was just normal for years for him i guess wow interesting huh uh and with that question answer i think so i talked about my dad yeah we got it we got the father james father dance yep and uh this question is answered yeah good luck i i hope it goes well it does feel like the right trade-off just saying it out loud i feel like spending more time with your loved ones

instead of work generally sounds better there's always nuance and extenuating circumstance but i agree with dave that you you it's pretty solidly in the middle of the bell curve to say hey i think i should work yeah five days a week really really hard on those days yeah exactly and i try to yeah i don't even want to give more advice on this but that's it's totally reasonable yep all right what should people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills audio that's a web page you can't just type your question into ai and and expect us to answer it on the show you have to actually go to a web page yeah when are we gonna get our like mcp server so you can i don't know so you can do we need one of those yeah no i think we definitely do

believe anyone where you can just go to ClaudeCode and type your question and it will submit the form on your behalf. Yeah, this podcast doesn't use hardly any tokens. Anthropic is furious at us. There you go. Anyway, I haven't finished the instructions though.

Okay. I got totally distracted. Go to softskills.audio, click the ask a question button, fill out our form. Thank you to everyone who does that every week. We really appreciate it. We get so many questions. We cannot answer them all every week but we will answer them all eventually yep just keep waiting all right thank you for listening we will catch you next week