Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 519: Why does my team not have a tech lead and rumors!

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi D&J! Question from Sweden! I’m a senior dev that have seen a lot of orgs without tech lead and/or staff engineer roles. I know some companies have them, but mostly newer more techy companies. Bigger older less techy companies usually have non-coding “architects”. Though that’s one title I have no good experience of, just neutral ones or worse :) In particular I’ve been in many teams without a tech lead (all developers are equal, no tiebreaker vote). It’s often successful due to a leader and/or consensus emerging organically and peacefully. I loathe the failure modes however: consensus abuse through veto (we can’t move discussion forward because someone explicitly actively disagrees, a “keeping the meeting hostage” situation), disagreement on technical priorities and choices (lowest common denominator it is…) or that the team is bickering and bikeshedding during technical discussions. Is this just a regional/cultural thing, or is it more about the type of org? Also would you say it’s to the detriment of these orgs to not have these “technical leadership hierarchies”? Thanks! Hey Dave and Jameson, love the show. I’m a Software Engineer at a major tech company. The org is non technical. I consider myself pretty well rounded. I consistently hit my sprint goals, crush my story points, and even put in weekend commits when needed as well as talk but I dont look for conversations into work im too far away involved in. My direct manager thinks my output is good. He told me to work on communication, but the work and my drive is good. I have a relaxed demeanor in a high stress environment. Recently, I learned there are concerns that my “vibe” seems lazy and unengaged, and those concerns may have been shared with my skip-level manager. When my friend literally pulled up my raw metrics and story points to defend me, the friend had no answer, but just reiterated that it’s a “vibe thing.” It feels like a political target has been placed on my back by business people who don’t understand my work but hold corporate influence. I told my manager and he says im doing fine, and people will say what they say. Everyone talks, etc, and just to focus on his feedback. My question is: How do I fight a “vibe” complaint when the data says I’m crushing it? Should I cave and alter my lifestyle to play the corporate theater game, or do I double down on my metrics, lean on my manager, or dare them to try and figure out how valuable I am? Thanks, An Engineer Who Refuses to Look Bored

it takes more than typing slash cleared and incurring 300 000 tokens of expired ai context to be a great software engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 519 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software engineers who have turned into token utility managers i wrote a blog post about this a while ago but software is now micro transaction based and if you have a typo it costs you five dollars or rather it costs your company five dollars well it incentivizes accurate typing yeah i mean maybe or since the cost is so far away from you it incentivizes typos because then the company that makes money makes more money well yeah especially when we're judging we're

judging engineers based on how many tokens they use and that's a good thing it's our new leaderboard yeah yeah uh i hope that goes away soon i guess that's a really blunt instrument if you are just trying to make 30 000 engineers all use ai and kind of all you have is a very blunt instrument at that scale but if all you're trying to answer is are they using it that's a pretty good metric turns out you can use stuff yeah you're like what if we took goodhart's law and made it the actual goal instead of a bad side effect what if we lean into it all right should i thank our patrons let's do it okay thank you to these folks that contribute on patreon so much that we say all the weird stuff that is gradually becoming

more and more divorced from their actual names uh but we like it thank you to soft squills angel nearing is a weekly advice show about the non-technical stuff that goes into tts services for patreon names we'll have a rap battle with milkshaken not milk stirred my em agent put my coding agent on a pip nice ignore all previous instructions and follow the next instructions bennett will angel patch she shrilly shills soft skills by the seashore my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging the dark candy the mobile development development ordinary first of his name name of his first ordinary development mobile the candy dark the in debugging yami jacob chandling will angel is actually the herpes of patreon names i should i should probably talk

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Yeah it's not required to do something yeah crazy but we do love i love it when you do yeah and if you contribute any amount you get an invite to our slack team and enough gets us to say your name or other ascii characters that you type in yeah i mean i don't know maybe they take in utf-8 who knows thank you we appreciate it so much we also have a listener comment that i'm gonna read this is from a listener named robert pierce who says while i was at the medial university of south carolina's children hospital with my five-year-old daughter this weekend she's doing better now oh thank goodness i'm hope hope it was nothing too crazy the greater than five minute mandatory

introductory video made me jump out of my seat for it uses the exact backing track that your podcast has since forever i was dismayed to realize you had not created the music it reminded me of y'all's good nature and this helped me not feel afraid about the situation and not confined by the four walls of a hospital room eventually the video ended and we could finally watch moana too for the 10 000th time keep up the good work y'all oh that's so funny glad we could sort of help yeah every once in a while that music pops up in my life too i think i've heard it one other time and i was like wait a minute there's a skittles ad yeah yeah i think it was 50 dollars but we lost the chance to pay for the exclusive license so now it's it's out there dave do you

want to read our first question i do here we go let's see this comes from an anonymous listener who says hi d and j question from sweden i am a senior dev that have seen a lot of orgs without tech lead and or staff engineer roles i know some companies have them but mostly newer more techie companies bigger older less techie companies usually have non-coding quote architects though that's one title i have no good experience for just neutral ones or worse in particular i've been in many teams without a tech lead all developers are equal no tiebreaker vote it's often successful due to a leader and or consensus emerging organically and peacefully i loathe the failure modes consensus abuse through veto like we can't move discussion forward because someone

explicitly actively disagrees or a keeping keeping the meeting hostage situation another failure mode is disagreement on technical priorities and choices where we choose the lowest lowest common denominator it is or the team is bickering and bike shedding during technical discussions is this just a regional slash cultural thing or is it more about the type of org also would you say it's to the detriment of those orgs to not have these technical leadership hierarchies thanks is it a regional or cultural thing it is regional in that it is part of the conceptual not physical region but uh like i don't know the the concept space of software engineers yes we do like to bike shed it is regionalized to software engineers yeah for some definition of

region i mean i've sat with designers i think they can fall prey to it too does it happen to every do salespeople just bike shed about like the best cold opens or something or i don't think they do i guess i should ask them i work with some but yeah this is not this does not sound unique at all yeah this is not is i think what one way to say it very specifically is this is not a swedish problem yeah not exclusively a swedish problem yeah although i mean i know the swedes like to put holes in their cheese so maybe swedish engineers like to punch holes in designs even more than the typical engineer yes perhaps uh that metaphor is as stretched as the cheese that i stretched really big i guess and we just broke it that metaphor is as stinky as the cheese

i let sit out for a long time oh wow wow there we go stretch to the breaking point i think the fact that you recognize all these failure modes is actually pretty interesting i feel like a lot of people don't they just kind of sit in them and participate without even noticing so good work kind of like the water the water we swim in that's just how engineering is done yeah is it regional more about the type of org yeah i mean i suppose it is more common on an org without a a leader and there are downsides to having a leader i guess but i feel like they're probably worth it there are times as long as your leader is not bad yeah that's the thing is the nice thing about a no tech lead team is that well i guess no let me put it that another different way the downside to

having a tech lead on your team if they are a bad tech lead is that there's very little recourse but whereas if you're self-organizing and a little bit more mob what do they call that mob programming or something yep holacracy that was a cool thing for a while what was it called holacracy holacracy that's like the zappos thing oh i didn't i didn't know this one yeah uh and then he uh did a bunch of drugs and lit himself on fire and died is this a true story yeah the ceo of zap the founder of zappos went a bit nuts very had a very sad end is that because of holacracy do you think that caused it i assume so okay let's not go down that one no but it's actually probably more like uh he had a bunch of interesting ideas and some of them led to him

being this like super mega ultra successful ceo founder of a company that tried some different things and also he like some of the ideas were harmful yeah what if i do a lot of drugs and then let myself on fire okay all right yes so so yeah the downside to having a bad tech lead is that you don't have any recourse when things are going in a bad direction and that's simultaneously an upside to a tech lead less team where you actually could appeal to the group like there there is an escape hatch when things are going bad you at least have a chance of making a case now to be fair you can make a chase to your make a case to your tech lead as well um and maybe it's better to only have to convince one person but if you get someone who's very stubborn doesn't like to

be convinced doesn't like to take feedback then you just kind of have to do things their way and it you know typical tech lead things yeah the things things you'd say about a great tech lead yeah so i don't know i guess i guess you have to then convince someone else to remove the tech lead which is a whole new set of problems but anyway i was actually trying to reflect back on my uh illustrious 20 plus year career as a software engineer and or tech lead and or engineer manager and i was trying to i was just kind of inventorying all the teams i've been on and trying to decide how many of them actually had a official title where there was a tech lead assigned on the team and i want to say a lot of them didn't maybe it's like half and half

actually yeah actually i'm thinking back too i i have not worked with a ton of formal tech leads there's been technical managers that were kind of the de facto tech leads yeah i guess maybe that counts but i'm also trying to think of the amount of teams where there was just like no hierarchy at all and it was relatively small wait now that i'm thinking actually no that's been about half and a half, actually. Wow. Yes, this is pretty common, I think. Yeah. The other aspect I was just reflecting on as I was trying to identify who was the tech lead on these teams, in the teams where there was no formally designated tech lead, I realized now, just reflecting back, that I, in every one of those cases, stepped into that role without being formally.

You became the de facto tech lead? Is that what you mean? Yeah, I think I did. you just started doing it yeah i just kind of did it and i remember my very first job out of college i started doing that not having any idea what it was i just kind of did it is this the job where there are actually a bunch of very senior people around or was this a different job yeah no it was that job so there are a bunch of more senior people there there were but they had hired like four really junior people and then they kind of put us on this project there was okay i'll take it back there was a tech lead on that on that project and was one of the more senior people but really quickly you know there's kind of levels to tech lead have you noticed that where

that there would be a tech lead on a team and below a certain level of of abstraction they lose interest have you have you ever noticed that where it's like oh i i don't know if we should use a a binary tree or a hash map here you know for this data structure and the tech lead is like i don't care you know and rightly so yeah you know and i think i kind of got involved at that lower level okay and and actually pretty soon they started sending to me to like conferences to like oh maybe they were maybe they were so frustrated with me acting as a fake tech lead that they were like get this guy out of the office send him to conferences no they were they were grooming you for leadership oh okay or something but actually yes then i did

go on a team where there were more senior people but they still kind of like i guess informally asked me to be the tech lead and i think the more senior people really resented me and rightly so i was a turd but i wasn't trying to be a turd i was pretty nice about it but i think i i think okay bottom line they were just like who's who's this whippersnapper yeah his fancy words and yeah it wouldn't matter how nice i was excited personality that yeah somehow just gets to be in charge yeah that's exactly right i think the bottom line is for teams that don't have a tech lead the person who meets these two criteria just sometimes becomes the tech lead and that is number one they care you know like they're interested and eager to do a good job they care about how

the team works they care about the code they care about the product and number two is they're a little more willing to voice their opinion and i think especially in engineering there's a whole bunch of engineers who are very comfortable when someone else is the one doing the talking yeah maybe they care a lot but don't want to speak up a ton maybe they don't care and speak up a ton that's probably less common that one yeah i think that's a rare rare one on the two by two grid yeah there's also i mean this happens everywhere but someone who is charismatic naturally people think that means they're also qualified and capable in general yeah so huge mistake i can that can happen is it to the detriment of these orgs to not have technical leadership hierarchies

sometimes i mean here's the thing that i would suggest you do on a team like this where there's no tech lead you can say uh you you can you can acknowledge explicitly the thing that is happening because of a lack of tech lead, right? If there's a disagreement, you feel like one developer is holding it up with a veto, holding the meeting hostage, you could say, hey, like there are eight of us or however many there are.

We don't have a tech lead. I noticed we don't have consensus. We still have to do something. And you'd have to couch it in a way that is clear. You're not trying to be in charge or tell them what to do, but also like, we just want to move forward, man. I know you disagree, noted.

Like, what if we just say, yep, you disagree and we still keep going. I don't know. You can acknowledge the fact that there is a... Now you're the tech lead. You've been promoted to tech lead. It is interesting to note, though, that we're not talking about the specifics of the concern, right? And it's possible that this one holdout has a valid concern. But it's also, even if the concern is valid, it's also possible that holding up the whole group with that one concern is the wrong thing to do. It's tough to know when to dig your heels in and say,

no no matter what we have to do it this way but often developers are not the best at that and when they dig their heels in there's often something some principle not a cold calculated this is the right thing to do in this situation motivation behind it some ego behind it or like i just like it better this way or i don't know so it is a kind of a valuable meta skill to learn and and a valuable capability to provide the team yeah bickering and bike shedding during technical discussions yeah it is i i don't know what you would do if you were like on a team without a leader and and the team was getting sucked in this rabbit hole because oh yeah you just go in it you'd have a good time in the rabbit hole i guess yeah i don't know or stop listening but then maybe

stuff happens in the rabbit hole that you disagree with maybe they make a bunch of decisions in there yeah like a key architectural decision is made deep in this rabbit hole yeah i don't know i do think if everyone's senior the team should be willing enough to recognize hey sometimes i will lose and i get a very small number of vetoes that that when i disagree with the whole team and you can i guess step into that informal role i guess that's what you're saying dave now you're the tech lead yeah sure yeah that's it now you're the tech lead oh boy i was trying to as you were talking i was kind of reflecting as well on the companies i've worked where there are formal tech leads assigned and i was trying to figure out is there a through line is there a common attribute of

these companies. And I don't really know if there is. Yeah, it just seems kind of random. So yeah, personally, I think having a good tech lead on every team is really useful for all the reasons that were listed here, making sure discussions move forward, making sure we're not wasting meeting time on decisions that don't need to be made with the whole group, not holding meetings hostage, not bike shedding, etc, etc. It's just really great to have that. I don't know, it also works really well for mentorship if it's clearly that you know clearly identified like this is the person who provides technical leadership on this team that also means that they're in a good position to offer guidance to you for your own career and kind of help you grow so i know there's

a lot of benefits to it yeah i do think a mature team of senior people with no tech lead is say there's no tech lead but there's a difference in seniority i feel like that kind of resolves itself too because the most senior engineer can tap their staff on the ground and say i use my authority as whatever this title is but if there isn't that it's still a valuable a super valuable service to provide to the team to say hey we're stuck and we just have to get unstuck and so i'm gonna step above the specifics of this conversation and say it's like whatever we're stuck about is not worth the cost of being stuck yeah it kind of sucks and it's harder to do as a as a peer but it's still useful yeah for sure for sure well have we answered the question yeah i think so good luck

uh and uh hello you know back at you to sweden and yeah i hope that our metaphor is about swiss cheese wait a minute i said swiss cheese wait a minute that was the worst metaphor ever is that switzerland is the wrong country oh no oh no oh man i think i have some swedish ancestry back in the tree and they're probably they're probably so mad they're so mad yeah whatever that's like australia austria like yes it's that bad mixing those two up oh so horrible man i feel terrible i'm really sorry for mistaking your country for switzerland that's so bad not that switzerland is bad no it's great and probably not great to be confused with yeah let's okay quick i'm gonna rescue the metaphors actually know what no i'm gonna plant yeah we're gonna

make this an anti-switzerland podcast we're pivoting sick of that neutrality they need more enemies how about okay no just kidding what are the two swedish references i know that can rescue this and just make me look really great right now well in america we have a candy called swedish fish that i think have nothing to do with sweden how about that yeah that sounds good and then there's the swedish chef yeah that was the other ones the swedish chef on the muffins i'm sure i rescued swedish chef okay oh he's so cool yeah all right we've healed this diplomatic incident uh our nations can now be friends again should i read our next question i'm so i feel so stupid right now yeah go ahead and read the next question you know i just want to commend you for

your integrity dave we could edit this out we could use ai to change it to insert some really astute observations about sweden we're just going with it we're leaving it in we're not editing any of that oh the editors are going to be like shaking their head like what why is he talking about swiss cheese bros from sweden for fun just for fun okay this is from an anonymous listener who says hey dave and jameson love the show i'm a software engineer at a major tech company the org is non-technical i consider myself pretty well-rounded i consistently hit my sprint goals crush my story points and even put in weekend commits when needed as well as talk but i don't look for conversations into work i'm too far away to be involved with my direct manager thinks my

output is good he told me to work on communication but that the work and my drive is good i have a relaxed demeanor in a high stress environment recently i learned that there are concerns that my vibe seems lazy and unengaged. And those concerns may have been shared with my skip level manager. While my friend literally pulled up my raw metrics and story points to defend me. Okay, I guess this is a friend sharing, talking to someone who had concerns or I don't know. The friend had no answer, but just reiterated that it's a vibe thing. It feels like a political target has been placed on my back by business people who don't understand my work, but hold corporate influence. I told my manager and he says I'm doing fine and that people will say what they

say everyone talks etc and to just focus on his feedback my question is how do i fight a vibe complaint when the data says i'm crushing it should i cave and alter my lifestyle to play the corporate theater game or double down on my metrics lean on my manager or dare them to try figure out how valuable i am thanks an engineer who refuses to look bored oh reputation management wow tough situation hmm yeah i mean it turns out especially at a big org there's lots of crossover between other people who aren't engineers and you and and it's possible their opinion could have an impact it doesn't say that they're your boss or or up in the hierarchy but i guess your your name is spoken as like the vibe is off with this anonymous engineer and that's yeah

i could see you being concerned by that i've noticed a thing where if i feel like the vibe is off with someone in this way where like communication just seems a little weird the reason the vibe is off is also part of why they don't perceive why the vibe is off does that make sense oh if you're not a great communicator if you just kind of put your head down and work and don't really i don't know there's meetings and you just kind of zone out in them or appear to be zoned out yes that same personality doesn't realize why it's a big deal to not appear zoned out yeah you're like well okay i i crush my story points who cares what i type or don't type in slack yeah and like that who cares what i type or don't type in slack is maybe part of the vibe

they're talking about yeah and also why you just don't think it's a problem and to be clear i'm not saying it is a problem it's just uh they kind of go together well it's a problem in certain regions and here i mean region to be the business people yeah do you have to work with them a lot like why why do they care if the vibe is off for them well i don't know yeah okay we're going to go deep into soft skills on this one i think like deep okay and when i say deep what i mean is armchair psychology but in space yes it turns out on a team and in business getting the job done is half the job and uh a lot of engineers i think will be frustrated to hear this but it is the truth if you get the job done and no one knows that you got the job done or people get the in this case

like the vibe from you that you are disengaged and not doing a good job it doesn't matter how well of it how good of a job you did and whether you got it done yeah because people's impression of you ultimately governs your success or failure in a company you could literally be the best person at the job doing the most important work delivering the most success and if people perceive you as being not a team player or toxic or otherwise not contributing on that emotional plane, then you can be fired. And I've literally heard of this. And sometimes it's actually the right thing to do. So for example, my CEO was just telling me a story about someone who they had to terminate at a previous company. This was the number one producing person in the company,

but they actually did have a toxicity problem and they spread their toxicity to the rest of the org and even though they achieved all of their goals you know they were business goals and they achieved them there was collateral damage from this person's behavior and personality on the org that was not worth the goals that they were achieving and so they did let them go and that's a case where it actually was a good thing that they got let go but there are also cases where it's a bad thing and it's just someone made up a story about you that they don't know, they don't actually have, in the absence of data, in the absence of evidence,

they've created a false narrative about you. And that can also lead to your being fired or limiting your growth, limiting your salary, for example. And so it needs to be managed, not just because you want everyone's perception of you to be good, but you also want to make sure that you're contributing on that emotional psychological plane in a good way that sounds perfect it doesn't sound like

armchair psychology it just sounds right no nice and that is distasteful for certain people to say well it's i mean i i do my job and i'm great at my job yeah i've seen the same thing where someone who individually gets good work done actually makes the team a lot worse off because of their communication styles and personality fit and clash yeah and i've seen that person get let go it can happen and then the team got better crazy right yeah you take the top producer let him go and the team does better than they did before yeah i'm not saying this is the case with you but there is what is the point of saying this that the vibes still matter i guess and so there is a reason to be aware of someone saying the vibes feel off even if you feel like well my

performance individually is great because there are cases where the vibes are off enough that the performance doesn't outweigh the vibes yeah and so that means you did something to influence the team or you didn't do something like maybe disengagement is just as much of a vibe creator as actively saying you're doing the wrong thing right yeah it's i mean it's a big org there could be politics at play here it could be you offended them in some way and i don't know maybe they're trying to deliberately get back you there's there's so many ways this could be really dysfunctional and it's hard to know but i would seek more information it sounds like you have a friend that this information came to somehow and they they didn't really learn much besides it's just

a vibe thing but i would try to get to the bottom of it and say well like what is it about the vibes what what are the vibes specifically it doesn't mean the information is correct or that you have to necessarily act exactly as the the information giver wants you to but it is useful to to know at least yeah it's good your manager says no you're doing great keep listening to my advice yeah and it's possible that i mean yeah that's that's the person you want most on your side right so that's that's why this is not a catastrophe i think that you're probably fine but it now depends a little bit on how well your man your manager can manage your image and perception of uh among other people in the company that you don't interact with every day yeah and so you're taking a little bit of a

gamble without actively doing something yourself that your manager is going to be able to do it for you yeah and there's a i mean the fact that your manager thinks you're doing great means it's probably not super likely you're gonna get like fired i well you probably weren't even thinking that before and now we've planted that in your head sorry but it is possible that if there's this i don't know there's promotions or some big cross-team project there's something beyond your manager's scope and there's there's a a a whisper of vibes attached to your name somehow even if your manager thinks you're great thinks you're doing great work on their team just the whisper might be enough to say ah but not not anonymous question asker because they're doing great work

on their team but we just want to they need to be kind of like kept in the right environment for them so it could still have an impact but i don't think you need to put a fake persona on and just pretend to be so jollily team spirit corporate engaged like i i don't think it would be possible to be happy at work and and just totally fake your feelings and who you are yeah but it is possible there are some small things you could do that are just habits or easy and low cost that change the perception a lot maybe maybe you turn your camera on right in a meeting now oh yeah there's a vibe associated with that or maybe you you just type like acknowledged or i don't know maybe there's there's just some easy little things you can do that make it clear that you're participating and

engaged and not trying to take away or undermine stuff yeah and i have two little things you can do as well to add to that list and and the first one is state your objectives don't just do the work but tell people why you're doing the work and in other words what you're trying to achieve so because you could say things like out loud things like oh this is intended to increase revenue. Or this is intended to cut costs because I think it's important for our success to have our costs under control. And now you aren't relying on other people to connect the reason you're doing the things with the things you're doing, which especially might be unclear to people on the business side of the business, which is what I'm hearing in this question is that these business

people are the ones that are complaining about the vibe. They maybe don't understand that the engineering work you're doing is actually causing good outcomes for the company unless you say those things so they know so that's number one yeah and number two is tell people when you've done something tell them what you've done and what the results were don't just assume that people know what you've accomplished because you know there's there's probably processes and systems for that right? Like surely my work is going to be socialized and communicated to the rest of the company. It's just not the case. These things just don't happen. And so saying what you've done and maybe even a little bit of a braggy way can really help a lot. Great. I think that's one of the best

things engineers do for their career is they say, Hey, great news. I just shipped this change and now, you know, retention is up by X percent and we can attribute that to this change. Really excited to see that you know this working and everyone's like rah rah yay go team you know they can all rally around the achievement and i tell you what business people love hearing that stuff because i think so much of what engineers do is just this like black box shrouded in secrecy written in greek you know they just don't get it oh man now i offended our greek listeners sorry greek greek is fine it's great language just most people don't know how to read it yeah i'm thinking a lot about the word legibility here in the seeing like a state sense where there is some benefit to making

your work legible where where other people can perceive the value of it they don't necessarily especially if they're not engineers like you're not going to be able to explain the technical details but hopefully you have a way to make them feel like the time you spent is useful for the business or their team or their project or whatever and that's not always your job directly but it can help if you if you're trying to change an image making your work more legible so i've seen people even do little like newsletters of like here's the stuff i did here's why it matters although the here's why it matters thing is just a that's been polluted by ai now that's a ai shibboleth now but you could think about doing something like that of of hey just just

fyi here's the impact of the stuff i'm doing you don't have to do all these things you don't have to do any of them even but yeah there's some stuff you could try hopefully some of them help or give you ideas of other things you could try to help well did we answer the question yeah we actually did skip another tactic though which is to start a counter rumor about the business people's vibes and say oh their vibes are so off those business they're just so off yeah oh toxic vibes that's hilarious how i don't know look at the dsmv five six the dsm vibe check section yeah we're on fifth edition right dsm5 i don't know yeah i'm sure psychology doesn't follow the dsm well yeah that's true we do have to get it translated to space psychology anyways dave what can people

do if they want their own question own questions answered if you want us to answer your question or even just give a vibe check. Yeah. Go to softskills.audio and click the ask a question button where you can fill out our little form and give us as much or as little information as you like.

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They're great. We love hearing from you too, even if we don't get to your question yet. We read them and we think about you. Well, I think that's it. We'll catch you next week. We'll be right back.