Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 524: My CTO AI-codes big piles of slop and early mornings, late meetings

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work for a small software company on a team of about 7 or 8 engineers. I like working here. I like the people, the autonomy, the pay, my boss, and the stack among other things. I try to remind myself of this regularly so I don’t take it for granted. I’ve been here for about 2.5 years and would love to continue working here. Our CTO, like many, has become a big AI cowboy coder. Every few months, he vibe codes a new project and then decides to interrupt the full workloads that we have a limited number of engineers to do to hand his project off to be cleaned up, worked into the product, and solve all of the problems that remain once actually put into practice. This usually ends up going to a different engineer per project, who is then tied up with the CTO’s whims and is no longer available to do the work planned by product. Our EM knows this and knows the frustration and lost velocity, but what can he do? (rhetorical, not the question) Most recently, I was tasked with implementing some reporting dashboards he did into the product, but he specifically asked me to make it in such a way that he can continue to work on and add to because he can’t be bothered to run the actual product. This is very concerning to several of us. He has no clue what he’s writing or how bad it is. We’ve talked about perhaps making him do PRs, but a) who can make him, he’s the CTO, and b) he’ll have no clue what to do with PR pushback given that he has no clue what he wrote. And again, who can make him actually fix it if he asks us to rubber stamp it? (rhetorical, not the question) I’ve been listening to the show for years and I’ve talked to friends at other companies, so I know this is everywhere. Is it as everywhere as it seems? Is it worth finding a new place to work where the CTO isn’t running so rampant? As I stated before, I’d rather not leave, but if I talked about that as a concern, I don’t want it to sound like an ultimatum, even if maybe it is at some level. Is this just the new reality for us, or is there something that can be done? I am a senior software engineer at a big tech company. I live in central Europe but my team is in the US and I’m 9 hours ahead. I have 7:30 pm meetings and sometimes take an hour before and/or after this meeting to prep or follow up. Previously I slept in later and started later to deal with these meetings. However, now my daughter is starting kindergarten and I wake up early (5-6AM) to be with her, drop her off, etc. Now in the evening meetings my brain is fried and I can’t even articulate myself well. The next day I think about so many things I wish I had said in those meetings. I can’t quit as I make 160K right now and I would only be making 60-80K tops in my country and have some financial commitments. Relocation to the US is also not an option because I have kids and don’t want them to move. So far I have been skipping meetings and my manager has not expressed concern but I feel so detached from my team. I don’t even know what most of my peers are working on. It feels like I am out of ideas to make this better. Please share your space wisdom with me :)

it takes more than getting a one trillion dollar aws bill to be a cloud native engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 524 i am your host dave smith i am your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for people who just blindly click the pay the invoice button and end up making amazon even richer i think they should have made it up to everybody by sending them a one trillion dollar and one cent credit to offset the one trillion dollar bill that would be cooler than saying oops it was a mistake ignore that yeah that would be the accounting way to do things right like no we can't it's a read-only journal we can only add new entries yeah i'm that would probably wreak havoc on a bunch of startups accounting somehow

surely that would somehow yeah imagine the time series charge showing your spending and like there's one month that's so tall that all the other months are zero pixels high Yeah. I have bad news about our burn rate. In case anyone doesn't know about this, AWS had introduced a bug in the spending, what do they call it, the billing and cost center or something? Billing, yeah. And people had these trillion dollar bills show up. By the time this gets out, it'll be old news, though. I already kind of forgot that happened. Yeah, I did too. It was a couple weeks ago.

We did not get that bill. Yeah. I didn't look that day. this is a good way to check if you have billing alerts though i guess yeah well i did oh fun fact my billing alerts were actually broken when this happened i fixed it the next week we didn't notice it until the next but anyway yeah cost anomaly you have spent 12 digits of dollars oh what a life i just assume if i owe someone a million dollars they will probably send leg breakers after me if i owe them a trillion dollars i think i just am the boss of the company at that point like cool you want your trillion dollars i guess you'll do a lot of things to get it huh

must be worth a lot to you yeah no amount of busted kneecaps will pay this back yep yep oh you broke my kneecaps you're never gonna see that trillion dollars now but if you leave my legs intact you just might yeah i'm gonna innovate our way out of this bill yes should i thank our patrons go for it all right thank you to these folks that contribute at the level that we shout them out every single week thank you too i quit my job now i'm broke but happy thanks for the advice will had a rap battle with space soft skills engineering podcast my em agent put my coding agent on a pip joel harks generate episode of the soft skills engineering podcast make no mistakes nice tim this week's enigma wheel setting is kxl pad skip six nice

who even knows what their actual names are my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging the dark canny token limit reached jacob shandling a tingle frozen barrel bees oh huh that might be related to that's some code yeah or is that an activation phrase somehow yeah a bunch of sleeper agents just woke up yeah this will angel copy crab deeply appreciates will angel's decision to release his name into the public domain move over will angel we're doing space names now nick molyneux embedded engineers treat assembly the same way typescript engineers treat javascript javier gonzalez chewy miamix angel drone to play salted fries single open parenthesis nice jameson's nordic country corner finland is the one with the saunas

the nordic country corner angel we do need to introduce a series where we just review these countries and make sure we never mistake switzerland for sweden ever again yeah won't angel dan from drone deploy never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like liver meow mcmonix please deliver i can see dodds kyle boss this the person hearing this can do very hard things kent c dodds oscar delegato listens to soft skills engineering while will angel listens to 10 junk miles jenny kim the stochastic parrot ira chan jonathan king is an eye beautiful beautiful functional user documentation adrian at kappa.ai dave if you're being held hostage chuckle lightly at the next patreon name will angel official approves

of all names but may raise an eyebrow at ragnar nice braden canes john grant britney ellick cats are the best people closed parenthesis followed by a literal closing parenthesis closed parenthesis then an actual closed parenthesis killer that one is brutal and i love it thank you thank you to this group you you are entertaining and creative and have excellent judgment and wise spending habits and you just introduced jameson's nordic corner yeah finland is the one with saunas and The one that used to have Linus. Yeah. If you want to join them, go to Soft Skills Audio, click support us on Patreon.

Dave, do you want to read our first question? Yes. This comes from an anonymous listener who says, I work for a small software company on a team of about seven or eight engineers. I like working here. I like the people. I like the autonomy, the pay, my boss, and the stack, among other things. I try to remind myself of this regularly, so I don't take it for granted.

I've been here for 2.5 years and would love to continue working here. Our CTO, like many, has become a big AI cowboy coder. Uh-oh. every few months he vibe codes a new project and then decides to interrupt the full workloads that we have a limited number of engineers to do to hand his project off to be cleaned up worked into the product and solve all of the problems that remain once actually put into practice this usually ends up going to a different engineer per project who is then tied up with the cto's whims and is no longer available to do the work planned by product our em knows this and knows this frustration and

lost velocity but what can he do that's rhetorical not the actual question most recently i was asked i was tasked with implementing some reporting dashboards he did into the product but he specifically asked me to make it in such a way that he can continue to work on and add to because he can't be bothered to run the actual product this is very concerning to several of us he has no clue what he's writing or how bad it is we've talked about perhaps making him do prs but a who can make him he's the cto and p he'll have no clue what to do with the pr pushback given that he has no clue what he wrote and again who can make him actually fix it if he asks us to rubber stamp it theoretical not the actual question okay let's get an actual question here okay last part

i've been listening to your show for years and i've talked to friends at other companies so i know this is everywhere is it as everywhere as it seems is it worth finding a new place to work where the cto isn't running so rampant as i've stated before i'd rather not leave but if i talked about this that as a concern i don't want it to sound like an ultimatum even if maybe it is at some level is this just a new reality for us or is there something that can be done great question very relevant very timely and makes me feel a little guilty yeah is this me i did submit a pr that i titled alien technology i left it in draft so it's okay you can't get mad at me that this is 10 000 lines of ai slop draft someone please take this from draft to ready to publish

and review it and qa it and deploy it yeah somehow that seems worse i think this is very common maybe some of the details are different and differ in degrees from other places but everyone is trying to figure out how ai works executives are generally very excited by the feeling that they can execute a ton of stuff as an ic yeah with a lot of control and also still do executive things they feel like they want to they they have some insight into the business needs or customer needs that maybe the engineering team doesn't or can cut through some red tape or i don't know whatever yeah it's always it's always been tempting to like say well i could just do this as an executive and then there's lots of reasons why that was a bad idea and ai takes away

some of those right it takes away some of them probably the biggest one that stopped you from doing it was i don't know what code to write yeah it would take me a really long time yeah to and now that problem is kind of gone i think there's i think what's happening here is there's an economic principle called externalities which is where someone takes an action that creates costs on someone else but the person who took the original action doesn't have to carry those costs and that's what's happening here you are absorbing costs that your cto is creating and i think there's i think there's kind of levels almost every cto does this i think and but there's levels to their to how much of the end-to-end work the cto takes on and like

your cto is doing it seems like the bare minimum i'm just generating code and then having everyone to do everything else. You mentioned that the CTO isn't even running the product locally, which is probably because they think they can't for some reason, or maybe your systems are too complicated and he hasn't been able to get AI to do it. But running it locally, of course, is a big thing that CTOs can do that helps a lot. And then the next one is making code reviews easier for other people. That's the next level where you actually do understand the code that your AI is producing. You've read it, you sign off on it, you certify it because you're now responsible for it. And then also QA, like you're going to shepherd it through the QA process,

whether that's you or someone else. And then finally production deployment, you know, and I, and I think this is just me maybe justifying my own behavior, but if you're a CTO and you're willing to do all of those things, then the externalities are minimized. It's just code review and QA usually, at least that's in my company's process. That's, that's what it is. There is more though, like on the go-to-market side for the product, like let's say you introduce a new customer facing feature or something and no one else in the company knows about it. They don't know how to advertise it. They don't know how to talk about it. They don't know how to sell it. They don't know how to support it. That creates a bunch of externalities there too. And chances

are you have processes for all of that that your CTO is bypassing as well. And I think when a CTO considers the full breadth of all of that, not just the engineering and the product side, but also the go-to-market, they would be a lot less willing to just cowboy code. I'm surprised the CTO doesn't want it to be excellent. It's not good. Separate from the impact on the team the the output is probably bad like the actual customer user experience yeah like if he hasn't run it yet even that's weird right yeah i mean that that to me is an absolute bare minimum yeah i could see uh a very ai pilled person saying yes yes all these externalities make it easy to review qa it good news like i've told ai to do all of that yeah

and i think that would be better than this state which is just like no no i i i did the fun rewarding dopamine hit bits where i just got to look at all these text characters stream by and like play with my fingers like mr burns as i cackle yes excellent that's the best part and you do all of the hard bits i don't know that's that just sounds horrible to me like i don't even think i would get a dopamine hit from just wow i generated 5 000 lines of code I told it to do something, and then something happened, yeah. To me, I get the satisfaction when I see that it's actually working. Yeah.

And looks good. I mean, the bar here is so low. It's so easy to tell a robot, hey, make this easier to review. Like, that is a phrase you can type in, and GPT-56 Sol or Fable can usually move it in a positive direction towards making it easier to review. It might not still be easy to review. Yeah, but you can... I don't know. You're not the one doing this though. The CTO did not write in. So I guess we're not talking to him. Yeah. The question is how do you influence the CTO to take more

responsibility for the end-to-end process that they've now... Yeah. You asked a rhetorical question. Our EM knows this and knows about the frustration boy. Can he do rhetorical? Not the question. I think that is the question. This is your EM's job. His job is to mediate between the business and the team among many other jobs and there's this negative thing happening to the team that presumably brings some business value and he needs to communicate up not just say oh shucks yeah man that really that sucks ah sure is rough what what can we what can you do huh you know that's that's what you're for exactly and well on the one hand that is what they're for. On the other hand, this feels very disempowering to have someone who is your boss

just completely bypass your autonomy and start telling your team, basically telling your team how to allocate their time. Because that's what's happening here, right? The CTO has taken that away from the engineering manager. You're saying it's disempowering to the EM? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they're not happy about it, not just from the team's frustrations, but from their own as well but there yeah there is a way to do this well like i i think you can say cto has good ideas about the business and or customers that are worth doing and there are some costs and we'll we need to not just dump them on the engineering team because the externalities are not just like it slows them down which maybe the cto is aware of that and says yep i would rather they do this

this feels more important than the stuff they would do instead but also the the vibes they're yeah it's gonna make people quit so i think you're totally right about that and i think one way to to communicate this to the cto and this might be your em's job you might need to feed some ideas to your engineering manager so that your em feels more equipped to confront the cto about this problem and i do think it needs to be confronted and i would say something like this look the cto i'm just gonna i'm gonna make some assumptions here so if they're not right you might have to tweak this advice, but one of my assumptions is that the CTO is not putting a ton of work into this. They are writing a few prompts and getting tons of output and then sending that

over in a PR. They're not running it locally, which you told us. And so that to me just means by definition, there's not much more work they could have put in. Yeah. It's like the first easy 80%, not the second hard 80%. Yeah. It's 80% done. Yeah. It's the 80% that takes 1% of the work, right of the actual effort so i would say maybe a rhetorical question could help the cto see the situation that they're creating by asking hey why don't we have you write the initial prompt to generate prs for every item on our roadmap and not just these pet projects which obviously is stupid you know he's i think the cto will see you immediately oh i mean that would be really dumb and and then hopefully your cto is smart enough to go oh i see i i'm that's what i'm

doing i'm just i'm i'm now sidestepping our entire roadmap planning process i'm inserting roadmap items and i think that by writing a prompt i've somehow saved the team a bunch of work and got us you know propelled us so instead i should just be giving ideas and prompts to the people to the process that we already have in place so they can create the roadmap items and then have the engineers just do the prompting and engineering work like usual it's also yeah there's so many degrees of difference or alternatives here too you could even say maybe the cto is iterating some on the work and saying no i like i like the vision that i have for this i don't want to just copy paste a prompt i am exercising some judgment then i think you could still just say here's a

prototype like please go build this for real yeah not take the artifact i have and get it into shape because that could be harder in some ways. It totally could be harder because you're like, I don't have any idea what this thing is. Yeah, start from this 10,000 lines of code and fix it up versus like make a thing that does the thing this prototype does.

And, you know, I had an experience a few weeks ago where there's a person in my company that I meet with pretty regularly and he represents the voice of the customer for our company. So he's a very valuable person for me to stay close to and brings me lots of in the trenches customer experience that informs my opinion about where our product should go.

and I'm a CTO at my company and I use this information a lot. And he got into the habit of sending feature requests to me in these meetings where he'd be like, Oh, I want this on the roadmap and this on the roadmap. And I thought I grew frustrated with this because we already have a process for submitting roadmap ideas. And it's, it's a great process. It works well. And we, we go through a vetting process and we put things in the right order for the business and for customers, et cetera. But he kept bringing these straight to me. I'm not going to that process. And so finally I asked him, do you bring me these feature requests? Because you believe that our normal roadmap process is broken. And he immediately was like, oh no, I don't think

our normal process is broken. I think our process is great. And I'm like, okay, well then use it, you know, like use that. And so he did. And so now we use this time to talk about other things like customer experience and stuff like that. That's more relevant to his role. And he goes to our, feature request process, like we have a little Slack channel, whatever, it doesn't matter the details. And I think that's what's happening with the CTO here. And I think you could say to the CTO, are you sending us these big PRs and bypassing our roadmap planning process because you think our process is bad? Or our output is too low or something. And it's possible the answer could be yes. Like, yeah, I think you're not moving fast enough. Great. Like, let's talk about that.

Yeah. I think the main point though, is you have to work through your, you don't have to, I think you should work through your EM, help your EM understand your frustrations, help your EM, uh, you're probably not the only one on the team frustrated by this. If your EM is frustrated by it, help your EM talk to your CTO about it. If it does get bad enough to quit, I think that's a pretty useful reason to say you quit. You could squint and say, uh, circumstances at my company looks similar in some ways as well. We have a CTO who is, not me, a brilliant person just in general, and does occasionally make large code contributions.

He spends so much time QAing them and iterating on them, and he is aware of how bad it could go. I guess if he just said, here's my vibe-coded slop, stop everything you're doing, your boss's boss said, go deal with this. And he works really hard to reduce those costs. And there still are costs. It's not free. It's not zero. But it's so much better than the situation you're describing. This can be done so much better and still provide the ability for people who have good judgment and are executives to do good work. So I don't want to make you slander your CTO in public here, but good news, only three people listen to this and one of them is your mom. So it won't be too bad. But would you say that overall you're pretty satisfied with the process your CTO goes through to produce code contributions? Yeah, I think so. So, I mean, that's great evidence that it can be done. Our business is so much better off for it, too. I can look back at everything that he's done and say, I don't know if that even would have happened at all if we just tried to do it the normal way. And it has proved out. Do you think, and again, I don't mean to have you slander anyone here, but do you think that the reason it's necessary for your CTO to step in and go a little bit around the process is because your normal process is actually not good?

No, but it has a useful escape valve now. Yes, I think that's the key. Yeah. I love that. Before, everything had to be backed up behind the process because only the engineering team would write code. Yeah. Yeah. And now, again, there is a cost. It's not free. Part of it is us adjusting to it on the engineering team. But I think it's incredible to have the ability to say, yeah, but if we don't

want to do this and we still really want this thing done, we can at the cost of more context switching and like, I don't know, some synchronous interruption for a day or two or whatever the cost is, whatever you end up with. And I think as long as the team is participating in that decision making it can be a lot more palatable for the team members to say oh yes we made this decision to bypass our process because the trade-offs are right as opposed to it got imposed on us and just dumped on us and it's actually not good yeah yeah that does make a big difference in how it feels right and at the end of the day aren't we all just a bag of feelings yes what else matters really that's what differentiates us from the llms they're a bag of numbers

all right dave have we answered the question oh one more idea you mentioned externalities and then i thought about uh pollution and then i thought about cap and trade so you should try and put in a cap and trade system for your cto yeah for every vibe coded line of code your cpa cto has to do something yep he has to pay you some bonus money or i don't know something good news you can buy the ability to dump this project on the team with we're gonna put a cap a total cap on the amount of ai slop but you can trade slop i love it i actually didn't even think about what cap and trade actually was so i'm glad you i just to the question okay why don't you read this one for us i will read it i am a senior software engineer at a big tech company i live in central

europe but my team is in the u.s and i'm nine hours ahead wow i have 7 30 p.m meetings and sometimes take an hour before and or after this meeting to prep or follow up previously i slept in late and started later to deal with these meetings however now my daughter is starting kindergarten and i wake up early around 5 or 6 a.m to be with her drop her off etc etc now in the evening meetings my brain is fried and i can't articulate myself well the next day i think about so many things i wish i had said in those meetings i can't quit as i make a bunch of money right now and we'd be making way less money i can just say the numbers it's anonymous i make 160k right now and it would only be making 60 to 80k tops in my country i have some financial commitments

relocation to the u.s is also not an option because i have kids and don't want them to move i've tried skipping these meetings and my manager has not expressed concern but i feel so detached from my team i don't even know what most of my peers are working on it feels like i'm out of ideas to make this better please share your space wisdom with me oh space time zones are so much simpler yeah i don't want to just reveal what we do but let me just say time zones not a problem in space completely solved i think relativity solves most of it yeah and i won't elaborate further yeah think about what the implications of that are the space mafia will come after you if you share that secret yep yeah man yeah this is a that is a sizable compensation difference

it's huge and makes sense that you have grown used to that i also want to know what's up with this 5 a.m kindergarten situation that's is this like the ultra gifted and talented program for super smart kids i think it's not kindergarten starts at 5 a.m i think it's like the day starts at 5 a.m because i have a kindergartner and we're hanging out together a little bit and yeah yeah i don't think it's just kindergarten evening meetings are tough for everyone and i'll tell you i have tried they are so i i do the opposite with my team so i have i have several people in central europe about half my team actually and for a few of the key leaders on that team i actually get up early in the u.s and i have 6 20 a.m meetings that i schedule with them

local time so that they can be fresh fresher in the day so for them what's that like two something p.m and i found it helps a lot that i do that and so i don't i don't think i don't think you could pull off having your team all get up at six yeah to do that i mean this is it is kind of the same thing of like the person one person is sacrificing to be in a more normal time exactly it's kind of what what the question asker is doing but i would probably talk to my manager about moving the meeting a couple hours earlier and i'm just looking at the times here 7 30 p.m local let's assume they're eight or nine hours ahead that's going to put them at 11 30 or 10 30 a.m in like california time or if it's on the east coast it's probably in like 1 30 p.m u.s east coast so there's

room here to move this meeting earlier call it 9 a.m local time in california which would be like more like 5 p.m i think that would help a ton if you could convince a manager to do that it's hard question to ask though because you're like look i'm the only one and i know i'm i've been i've been given great accommodation to be able to work for this wonderful tech company that i love and make a ton of money for you know i'm assuming it's on the west coast pacific time us because they mentioned a big tech company so it's probably yeah it's probably west coast it could be east coast though and it could even be central you know like it could be in austin could be new york city or it could be bay area those are kind of or seattle right yeah if it's yeah so maybe you

maybe you haven't considered the meeting could just move because my life has changed a bit to make this thing that worked no longer work that's a good idea i would that's that's the only solution i can think of it's so hard otherwise i guess alternatively you could do like a midday nap time you know after you drop your daughter off at kindergarten i will share with you and everyone listening a little secret you can do that even if you don't work with people on the other side of the world oh but only if you're remote or i guess some places have nap pods but those are probably the kind of places that want you to live at the office yeah i guess i do live at the office your home office yeah yeah that could work but i've seen this for sure and i'm

gonna guess that your uh native language is not english and so one of the things i've noticed with my team members whose native language is not english who live in central europe and they've told me they've said look dave my english skills deteriorate later in the day it's harder for me to form words and sentences in english and i'm like oh i totally get that and that's why i say same honestly yeah yeah it's not just you it's just double hard when you're having to translate yeah yeah well and so i totally get this and i do think you need to do something about it because it's probably not sustainable alternatively you could just like just drift into mediocrity i i would hate this for your career but you think about maybe skipping

these meetings uh regularly it's like a daily meeting you think maybe yeah i mean if you if you skip it most days so that it's only a couple days a week you could probably arrange your schedule a lot better so you have a late day a late couple days i also get the impression that there's some social camaraderie things too if you skip the meeting because you're so tired and zonked out but not only do you not know what they're working on i mean you probably enjoy talking to these people they're your co-workers i think in general i've enjoyed interacting with my coworkers. I usually like the people I work with. So it, it would feel lonely if, uh, you're by yourself most of the day and then you have this connection point and you're, you're losing that

connection point. Totally. Wouldn't underestimate that. Maybe it is a meeting that is hard to move though, where it's not just your team. It's, it's some big cross coordination meeting where there's a bunch of different teams. And then that feels a little bit trickier to say, Hey, can you move it just for me yeah totally now another option is if this is a big tech company and you're in central europe good chance they've got other teams that are either in your area or that are time zones much closer like london or germany like berlin amsterdam yeah certain cities in poland have a big tech presence and it's very possible you could transfer to one of those teams and maintain your remote status if you need it and then now your time zones are only like at most

one or two hours off instead of eight or nine yeah yeah that's a good idea i'm assuming you there's not just an easy hub locally surely there's some solution that involves like replacing yourself with a robot and live video generation and and then you realize that it's actually better at your job than you are but you don't want anyone else to know that yeah i i just these are moments where i reflect on how the world will be different when we have teleportation and you can just step through a little door meet with people in person no matter where they are it'd be so great i don't know if it helps the time zone problem as much but i was just thinking that how surely if we fix if we can do teleporting we can also bend time a little bit too okay so

indirectly to invent teleportation we would have already invented time travel yeah that helps the time zone problem yeah and maybe it's like a very maybe it's a very practical time travel that won't let you go back to the future mode and erase yourself but it will let you just like step into a meeting at a convenient time maybe it's specific to tech company meetings yeah exactly yeah you got to keep it on task or otherwise the space-time continuum dissolves yeah and there's no way to cheat on the stock market or the lottery you know it's just yeah it's just for capturing action items yeah and the enemy is probably those prediction market companies because they're trying to make it so you can cheat on the stock market with it yeah

Well, they have a lot to lose. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're the only reason we don't have time drop. It's a polymarket. They're the only reason. Yeah. I'm sure it's already been invented and they've been holding it down because think of all the money they would lose if everyone knew the outcome before they placed the bet. That's true. I think, yeah, it probably goes deeper even than we think.

I mean, yeah, is there another great answer? I can't really think of anything besides try and rejuvenate yourself somehow. Move the meeting. Suck it up and pay the cost. I don't see a great other answer. It's moments like these when we find out what we really value. And James and I have both had this opportunity over the course of our career a few times where there's money on the table, and then there's life choices that are required for

that money. And I personally have surprised myself when I choose certain life things over sums of money that I think if you had asked me on paper before I was actually living it, I would have taken the opposite on paper. but then when the actual situation is in my lap or i'm living it i go you know what i'm out i'm doing the opposite maybe this will be one of those times we didn't acknowledge this though yeah props to you for not saying i guess i'll just ignore my stupid daughter that takes me away from this big work meeting like from this very important work yeah i feel like you have you have made the

right choice by prioritizing time with your daughter and it is unlikely you will regret that in the long oh yeah even if it means less money it does change stuff you know yeah yeah yeah and how dare you jameson impose your values on this poor company that tech company needs this engineer yeah there's a lot of little kids out there there's only one of this engineer yeah seriously not fungible yeah oh man i feel like i should go hang out with my kids now i know let's wrap this up oh all right what can people do if they want their own question answered go to soft skills.audio and click the ask a question button and from here on out every answer will be go hang out with kids whether you have them or not and um yeah don't even listen to this show yeah yeah

but thank you for listening up until now yeah it's been a good run it's been a good run we will catch you next week I'll see you soon.