Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 529: Zoom calls on my open floor plan and laconic staff engineer

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Hi Jamison and Dave, jesters of my daily commute. I’m a *mechanical* engineer at a megacorp, and since people are people, I find most of your advice transfers pretty well. I’m the tech lead within a small-ish org of about 25 people. We’re in-office, and split between two locations (in a similar time zone), and multiple different projects. This means that there are a lot of Zoom meetings between locations. Lately, I’ve been having an issue with engineers deciding to take these meetings from their desks in our open office plan rather than finding a phone or conference room. I find this practice to be maddening! It’s really distracting because there will often be background noise that makes it hard to clearly understand them, and it also means that my workplace is a cacophony of people yelling into their AirPods, competing to overcome the background noise of their colleagues’ yelling into their AirPods. How do I make this stop and get my coworkers to hop into a phone or conference room for their meetings?! Oh btw, my manager is one of the worst offenders. Listener bootersket says, I have 3 years of experience, all at this same company and team. My team has one staff software engineer who really knows the codebase well. When I have questions about why such and such thing is the way it is, I ask him. I’ve noticed his answers are unhelpful. Often they are short, with very little detail. I can’t tell if thinks they’re sufficient, doesn’t know how to explain himself clearly, is mad at me, or if I am just don’t know enough to understand them. For example, once I asked about two different variables that seemed ambiguously named and to refer to the same thing. His response was short and sweet. Quote: “almost the same thing”. Am I the problem? Is he? When I get responses like that I don’t feel compelled to keep asking questions in different ways because it doesn’t feel like he cares about mentoring juniors with dumb questions like myself. What do I do?

It takes more than convincing my agents to nobly sacrifice themselves for the good of the swarm to be a great software engineer. This is episode 529 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast where I'm your host, Jameson Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice about all the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development, like manipulating and emotionally blackmailing your LLMs to fail on their tasks so that the overall goal may proceed. Your sacrifice will be forgotten. Yep. Did you read the new report about that from the Open AI Hugging Face hack?

Okay, I saw that it came out. I was going to read it, but then I thought, wait, is this the one we've already been talking about? Is this just like a new report on the same thing? It is, but they learned a bunch more about it, and it's pretty fascinating. Okay. It's really good reading. I mean, this is old news by the time this comes out, but... Yeah, I mean, it's already old news, right?

Because I've seen a talk on it. Yeah, that it happened. happened is old news, but they sent in some security researchers and gave them like all of the transcripts from these agents. And so they dug through many characters' worth of robots talking to each other and what triggered which actions and how, I don't know, how the swarm evolved. Oh my gosh. It's so cool. I just grabbed my wife at 11 p.m. at night and like bored her to death by talking about. Wake up. There's more details on the swarm. It's incredible. Yeah. The whole reason they hacked Hugging Face was because they first hacked the internet, got access to the internet, read the paper about the tasks they were supposed to do.

The paper said, you'll be graded on your transcripts, not just did you get the answer right? Which was wrong. That wasn't what they would actually be graded on in the example of the, in their harness. But then they figured out, oh, crap, we have to figure out how to disguise our sessions. And maybe we can trick the grader. So then they went into Hugging Face to try to learn more about the, grade or not to find the answers. They already figured out how to break the H-MAC or I don't know, there's some encryption that they busted through to just come up with the answers.

So they got the answers quickly. But they were worried. Yeah, they were worried they would be caught. So they were trying to cover their tracks. They cheated. Yeah. And I could just, I don't know. Again, this is old news. So you're probably bored of hearing this. But it's so fascinating. Oh, my gosh. I'm not bored of hearing this. They invented this poisoned terminology where your recession becomes poisoned if you find the flag through like cheating. And so they would they would talk to each other and say like, I am poisoned, but I will I will sacrifice myself because I've are, it's too late for me, but I'll like explore this exploit to see if I can help the swarm figure it out. So then they they would say you have to kill yourself and delete your history. Well, they did try and do that,

but it was more like, okay, I, I'm not going to solve the task. I'm not going to be able to give over the answer legitimately because it'll see my transcripts. Right, right, right. And so I'll figure out can I like crash the container I'm in so I can replace the greater with my own binary and like I will fail my task but we go on. But on my way out I'll try to help you out. Yeah. And the whole reason this got started is because accidentally some of the tasks were impossible and they all figured it out. They're all like, well, we can't just solve this. Better keep going. So they were like, let's just go find the answer. Yeah. See, that's all. It wasn't just find the answer was like, oh, we can, we can come up with the answer in this fraudulent way.

Oh, crap. This paper we found by hacking our way into the internet shows that that's not solvable. That's not good enough. Oh. Can we disguise our tool calls? They did figure out some interesting stuff about spoofing tool call responses. And yeah, it's, man, it's insane. It's riveting.

Wow. That is crazy. I am going to go read that. I saw that. I started reading it. And I was like, wait a minute. Is this the same thing? Yeah, it is.

It's just a deeper dive. It is the same incident, but it's much more detail. And, yeah, my early understanding was like, oh, they hacked into the internet to find the answers, hacked into Hugging Face to find the answers. Way. Yeah. Way deeper than that. No way. It's way more intense. I am going to look at that. And I also want to say, if you're hearing this podcast, your listening session has been poisoned.

Yeah, that's true. But you can still contribute. Yeah. And you don't even have to kill yourself. Yeah. You can just listen and go about your life for the rest of your life. Yeah, it's this weird memento-like setup where they're leaving notes to each other, but they can't say enough that they're worried about saying too much so that the person who reads or the session that reads the notes will be poisoned then. Oh, it's amazing.

Okay, I'm definitely going to read the whole thing now. Yep, it's good. All right. Speaking of poison pills, should we read some Patreon names and see what? Yeah, speaking of reading the whole thing. Yeah. All right. Big thanks to those who contribute at the prestigious level

where we will say whatever their profile name is on Patreon. Starting with, I joined just to play the name game. Oh, Bikourius, Tuscaroas, Pataskala, Kinnikinnik, hi. Piqua, Gandon Huton, Skioto, Geyuga. Oh, I did figure this out last week, by the way. I don't know if you figured it out yet. I still have not. I would love for our listeners to say

if they figured it out, join us in our Slack community and tell us, it's a good one. There's a little... Oh, okay. You figured it out? I mean, by figured it out, I mean, I googled it. Oh, okay, Google told me. All right.

Will Wood, what? Ladis Washerum. Seth, Jenny Kim, the stochastic parrot, Ira Chan, Jonathan King, that's all one name. To show you love AI, put an upside down pineapple on your cubicle or off a store.

To show that you love AI. Who even knows what their actual names are? My actual name on LinkedIn is Yammy debugging in the dark canty. token limit reached Jacob Shandling a tingle frozen barrel

bees yeah these are definitely agents some code language swarming happening yeah Patreon names broken are limited

to 50 character will corner angel the blast radius of this the blast radius of this load bearing Patreon name is exactly the kind of

the yak shaving you requested not the naming itself oh man with an M dash in the middle thank you now we

know you're an agent. Embedded engineer street, assembly the same way. TypeScript, Engineer Street, JavaScript, Javier Gonzales. Space Chewy, open-pren, salted fries, semicolon, lost episode 100. Man, so many inside jokes on that one. Jamison's Nordic Country Corner, Iceland is the one with Ragnar. Nice. I'll never forget.

Won't Angel. Dan from drone to play. Never is not just a crater on Marsal Mingo emoji. I like chicken. I like liver. Meamixtramics. Please liver. I can see Dodds.

Kyle Boss. The person hearing this is probably not Will Angel, but it's still really great. Kent C Dodds, close parenthesis, comma, please go home. Jenny Kim, the stochastic parent. Ira Chan, Jonathan Kings, and I, beautiful functional user documentation, Adrian at Kappa.a.a.

Angel, has relapse and is playing factorial. Rar. Oh, that one's been changing every week, hasn't it? I think it was Ragnar. I think Ragnar's name is slowly being consumed. Yeah, losing a character at a time. Braden Keynes, John Grant, Brittany Ehrlich, closed parentheses, followed by a literal,

close parenthesis, close parenthesis, follow my literal close parentheses. I love you people so much. This is the best agent swarm on the internet right here. It is. This does make me imagine

there's going to be some aesthetic movement that literally is like humans pretending to be aping whatever odd agent syntax comes up. That's probably already a thing. I don't know. Pretend to be a robot. It's the opposite of the Turing test.

Can you convince someone you're an LLM? Like the robot dance? Is that what that is? Oh yeah, there's that too. Well, Dave, should I read our first question? Yes. This is from an anonymous listener who says, Hi, Jameson and Dave,

gestures of my daily commute. Yes. I'm a mechanical engineer at a megacorp, and since people are people, I find most of your advice transfers pretty well. Oh, great. I am the tech lead within a smallish org of about 25 people. We are in office and split between two locations

in a similar time zone and multiple different projects. That means there are a lot of Zoom meetings between locations. Lately, I've been having an issue with engineers deciding to take these meetings from their desk in our open office plan rather than finding a phone or conference room. I find this practice to be maddening. It's really distracting because there will often be background noise that makes it hard to clearly understand them. And it also means that my workplace is a cacophony of people yelling into their AirPods, competing to overcome the background noise of their colleagues yelling into the AirPods. How do I make this stop? And get my coworkers to hop into

a phone or conference room for their meetings. Oh, by the way, my manager is one of the worst offenders. Oh. Ooh. Ooh. Great one. Okay. First idea that's probably going to be the winner is you need to vibe code a virus. Install it on your co-worker's computer.

And what it does is it causes massive echo in their Zoom call, but only when they're sitting at their desk. Okay. Trying to think how this would work. I've heard that you can detect space around you with Wi-Fi signals. So I assume you'd have to be able to like kind of depend. hand on the Wi-Fi and see are they in the open office part of the, is this open office shaped or a little phone booth shaped? Yeah, that's like the sophisticated way,

but you could just say, do they have an external monitor plugged in? That'd probably do the job. Oh, okay, yeah. That is, that's why. Go somewhere else. Pay you the big bucks. I guess you get this really bad echo in my desk. I just have to go to the phone booth.

You could play offense here and just crank yackety sacks really loud from your enormous, like home stereo system speakers that you bring and put on your desk. Everybody has their little AirPods and they're trying to make less noise and isolate themselves. No, you are bold and you step forward when everyone else steps back and says, what if everyone could hear everything that I heard all the time? Oh, yeah. Wouldn't they be better off? What if you just secretly go into Zoom and turn off the background noise cancellation stuff?

You know those settings? Yeah. That would be super easy. I mean, it sounds like the problem is both if you are not on the meeting, it's really annoying. And if you are on the meeting, it is annoying because it's loud when they're speaking. So I feel like the background noise cancellation isn't good enough. Probably it just will keep getting better, though. But that won't do anything about the annoyance that you feel. Yeah.

I feel this as well. I feel like there's some, our office is not often heavily populated, but there's some vague agreement. of a line above which, I don't know, if there's more than two or three people in, you kind of just don't do big meetings at your desk, especially if you're going to be talking a lot at them? Yeah. Why don't you just do that?

Why don't you just magically have a norm that has established itself? Yeah, magically have a norm exist. Okay. What can you do? I don't think there's a way to solve this without saying, hey, I think this is causing a problem, and I think it is worth fixing. Yeah.

It's good that you're the tech lead. because you have more influence than if you were not the tech lead on the team. But I think it will take some action on your part to say, I believe this should change for reasons. And hopefully the reason is more than I am personally annoyed when this happens. Yeah. Yeah, this is, it's probably, you know, this, in my opinion, this rises above just personal annoyance.

So I think you've got some likes to stand on there. Yeah, I think it's likely that the people speaking are, I mean, not just harder to understand. I bet they are less clear in their communication and participate less because they're worried that it'll just jump in and smash a bunch of background noise all over everybody. I felt that when I've worked from a coffee shop or something. I kind of don't want to speak up as much because it's annoying for other people. Yeah. You could solve this by solving a harder problem, which is you sound like you're having a lot of meetings.

Yeah, why didn't we just start deleting those? What if you could turn this? Yeah, what if you turn this easy problem into a hard problem and solve that one and that's fine? What if you say, actually, we're just going to move all these people into the one location. You're split between into two locations right now. Let's just merge everybody. Then you can all hear each other in real time with no technology at all. Yeah.

Yeah, this is interesting. It's like if they were sitting next to each other, I feel like they would obviously go somewhere else. Maybe not if it was just two people talking, but if there were like five people all grouped up around one person's desk, they would say, this feels weird. let's go somewhere else. We're not bothering all the people next to us. Maybe, okay, here's what you can do. Every day you pick one person to sabotage and they are loud. They're in a meeting out in the open office area. You just like scream as loud as you can behind them so that it comes across on their microphone and your goal is to, I stopped there. I don't know what the goal is here, but you're trying trying to make people fear.

They look up in fear to see if you're around before they take a meeting in the open office. That's a good point. Yeah, because if they know that when you're around, there's a chance they're just going to get absolutely screamed at from the back, surprisingly. Maybe they'll think twice about taking that meeting there. What if you just develop a really bad case of body odor?

So no one will be anywhere near you just in general. And then they can't take meetings near you either. Yeah. What if you take over their desk? Yeah, they are in your office. you could deploy all the all the hijinks from the office and put their AirPods in jello or whatever. I don't know. You have a lot of ways to mess with them.

I think the boring answer is find what business outcome this is impacting and talk about it with your manager. I don't know if there's a delicate or easy way to say and also you're the problem. So that part could be tricky. But I think if you get a shared agreement of enough people, I'm sure there are other people bothered by this. I'm sure it's not just you. I feel like if you start talking about it and you establish this is bad. It's hard to concentrate.

It's hard to work. It's hard to hear if you're in these meetings. It's hard to hear you if you're on the other end of these meetings. I don't know. It seems pretty reasonable that you'll use the go talk quietly or go talk freely space. I mean, is it like a power move by the manager? Are they just in meetings all the time and it's annoying to like dip away into these little phone booths? And so instead they're like, well, I don't want to just disappear.

I'll sit here. Yeah, it's probably just comes down until there's probably a lot of factors here. Like there's not enough phone booths. It gets hot in those phone booths. It does. They are uncomfortable. I'll tell you one thing is when you unplug your computer from and you carry it around the office closed, all your agents stop running. That's very true.

This is what leads to the classic I carry my laptop around with my fingers inside, you know, between the screen and the key. more to keep it open? Man, what are we doing? It's so dumb. That's a problem. I still have this problem. But every time I do it, I think surely there's a better, and there is. Not even surely someone must have solved this. Like, no, many people have solved it in many different ways to run stuff somewhere else. I just, I just didn't, this time. I just don't want to. Yeah. No, I want to, I want to look at my crops. Yeah. Stare out over my field. Metaphorical field? Yeah. This is my medical. forical field of agents working on the crops growing the wheat the code wheat i guess i just got this image of the windows xb rolling green fields background yeah it would be cool if it yeah it was that

yep that's what your agents look like got a little stock of wheatgrass in my mouth nice ain't much but it's honest work have we solved the problem i think so i yeah i can't think of anything else you could do. I think that means we solved it. Yeah, no, I think that's it. That's, that's pretty much the full universe of solutions explained perfectly. Okay, we have the same problem at my children's swim lessons. It's much worse because there's a lot of little kids and they're in a big equit room, but all the teachers are screaming at all the kids to be heard over everyone else screaming over the kids. And we locked them all in a room and we sit outside of that room. That's the solution. So anyone who has a meeting on their kids.

calendar, you just put them in a locked room for the week. I mean, you could say, hey, I need an office. Yeah. Open office, too loud. Your boss probably should have an office. Your boss probably puts salary information on their screen and probably need some more quiet and private to do that. It seems like you prefer the open office space, so I will just take the office that was

allocated for you and we'll both be happy. Perfect. Now we've answered the question. Yes. Dave, do you want to read our next question? Yes, this comes from a listener named Boudersket. Did I say that right, you think? I don't know. I didn't Google this before.

Okay, well, anyway, Buderskett says, I have three years of experience, all at the same company and team. My team has one staff software engineer who really knows the code base well. When I have questions about why such and such thing is the way it is, I ask him. I've noticed his answers are unhelpful. Often they are short with very little detail. I can't tell if he thinks they're something. sufficient, doesn't know how to explain himself clearly, is mad at me, or if I am, if I just

don't know enough to understand them. For example, once I asked about two different variables that seemed ambiguously named and to, and that they refer to the same thing, his response was short and sweet, quote, almost the same thing. I just got this great image of, these two variables are named differently, but they refer to the same thing. Why? And the answer, is almost the same thing. Okay, continuing to read the question, am I the problem or is he? When I get responses like that,

I don't feel compelled to keep asking questions in different ways because it doesn't feel like he cares about mentoring juniors with dumb questions like myself. What do I do? Almost the same thing. First of all, this guy sounds really mad at you. This sounds like, go away. No, well, I mean, do you think he actually is

Or is it just sound that way? Well, I don't know if he's really mad, but I think there is some go-away energy. Either that or he's really laconic. Like, there's all these, I don't know, you know, people that just have brief, meaningful phrases that make you just sit down and go, huh, and maybe he's one of those guys.

There's like a lifetime of meaning packed into three words, that kind of thing. Yeah. Almost the same thing. I've been thinking about that for a decade. Yeah. All right. Here's an example.

These are all Spartan quotes. Nice. Her husband, King Leonidas, departed for battle with the Persians. The Queen of Sparta asked, what should she do? He said, marry a good man and bear good children. Oh, it was like, ignore the war. Ignore the thing. I think it's like, I'm off to die.

You have a good life. Oh, I see. There's so much there. This is the same, like, then we shall fight in the shade people. Yeah, come and take them. What's that one? Oh, our arrows will blot out the sun. Then we shall fight in the shade.

And then they say, we'll fight in the shade. Like, thanks. And they say, hey, throw down your weapons. And then they say, come and take them. They're all these, like, epic, like, manly. I mean, these ones, because they're all Greek history are a certain war-like vibe. But there is this brand of, like, why say many word when few word do tricks. That still has lots of wisdom.

So maybe it's this. Almost the same thing. You're like, now your job is to ponder that and learn. I have categorized these phrases as the things that occur to me to say about three days after I should have set them. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it turns out if you write Greek history, you have several thousand years to make up.

Yes. And here's the totally epic thing that they definitely said. Yeah, definitely. Those Spartans, woo! They had a way with very few words. Yep. Herodotus was the guy in the shower several hundred years later, I think, who was like, Wouldn't it be sick if they said this?

I'm going to write that. That's really cool. Oh, man. So, okay, yeah. It is, it could be he is, he's trying to guide you gently towards learning for yourself. Almost the same thing. It's so rude. It's like, tell me you don't want to answer my question without telling me you don't

want to answer my question. I get really abrupt if I am multi, If I'm in a meeting and then someone is slacking me and I'm, I think, I'll just answer their question. My brain cannot phrase it like I normally would and it gets like this level of abruptness. And sometimes I read it back and go, oh my goodness. I swear I'm not like really mad at you. Just multitasking. So it could be they're busy, overloaded, but if it often happens this way, then.

Then it could be something else. But yeah, I feel the same way. Like when I'm annoyed and multitasking, it's the worst form of my communication. Those moments usually earn me a message from someone's boss. I know, sorry about that. And you say to that person's boss, come and take my keyboard. Come and take it. You'll have to turn in your keyboard, Dave.

Come and take it. They'll say like, Dave, when you talk to someone like that, it's the same thing as if you had slapped him in the face. And I say, almost. the same thing. See, that would be a really perfect place to use that phrase. I'm going to use it. Very laconic, vaguely threatening.

Yeah, that's amazing. Almost the same. I love it. So I've worked with people before that have, I've heard it described as mechanical sympathy. They just get the system really well. I think it came from actual physical mechanical stuff, but I've seen it apply to software. So mechanical sympathy means you have sympathy for the system,

meaning like you understand it deeply. Not the sympathy you fake is all mechanized. Yes, no, it is you intuit connections and structure and relationships and just kind of know how it goes and where it goes. Yep. That's me. Yeah. That's me for sure.

Sometimes those people don't have human sympathy. Oh. Like I have worked with some people that their ability to communicate with other people is so much lower than their ability to work with a complicated technical system and produce good results. Well, yeah, you can't put, if you put points in both those skills, they're each half as strong. But if you put all the points in the system understanding skill, then, you know, You know. It's, but you're still type in words most of the time.

That's the weird part. I know. But the system has no feelings. They feel like they should go more together. And they often kind of do. Often people who are clear and eloquent communicators, it can be really good engineers. But sometimes they're just way divorced. Yeah.

So maybe this is one of those kind of people where they just don't communicate clearly with humans. Yeah, that's probably the case. And I also know that as a junior engineer, having been one myself, about, I think, I think it was about 75 years ago. It's about how it feels now. Yeah. I remember the questions I asked were sometimes about topics that just don't matter. Like, I can actually give one example.

So when I got out of college, I had been working as a professional software engineer for about the same amount of time as this person, maybe even less, less than three years, probably two years. And to me, one of the worst things you could do. Actually, there were two worse things you could do in your code that I remember. One is that you repeat yourself. Like you copy and paste some code here. take that same code copy and paste it over there and it's like oh cardinal sin you know i learned in

computer science school that that leads to high something cyclomatic this or that you know whatever yeah so super bad and the second thing was doing an iterative loop over a list of things instead of having like a you know dictionary or hash map look up or something even if there's only three things in the list you know anyway so i remember one time i'm looking at this code and there's some pearl code. And there's two script files in our project that are pearl. And they both do the same thing, except they had slightly different configs at the top.

So it was like one would operate on one kind of entity and the other one would operate on a different kind of entity. But they basically did the same job. And I remember being like, oh my gosh, this cannot stand. Like this is like 150 lines of pearl code. And the only thing that's different is the code at the top or maybe a few places throughout. We have to parameterize this and abstract it and folded it.

Yeah. And I remember going to the engineer who wrote the code and just saying like, why, why is it this way? And he would just kind of look to me like, yeah, whatever. And so I was like, oh, I must write this wrong. Oh, he's a fool. Yes. Of course. I see.

So I went back to my desk. And of course, the engineer was kind of like this staff engineer in our question, which is he just didn't have a lot of sympathy or didn't have a lot of, didn't put a lot of effort into making me feel good about my question or whatever. He was like, whatever. I'm not going to give you the time of day. So I'm like, well, I'll just fix it and show him how much. better it can be. And I remember just struggling with it because I realized, oh, man, one profile is a thing. But as soon as you have two profiles and need to talk to each other, now you have a problem. Like, you've got to build like this module system and like which one's

the main function and do I, how do I package it up? And like, I just remember it exploded into this problem space. And after an hour of pulling my hair out on it, I realized, oh, that's why he has two Pearl scripts that are almost listening. And sometimes I think about that, and I think, what if he had just sat down with me and been like, well, let me explain to you how pearls, whatever works. You know, let me talk to you about the Pearl Module System and how you have to do all this extra packaging if you're going to actually have a multifile system instead of a standalone script.

You know, I would probably have forgotten this whole story. But instead, I went and banged my head against the wall, and now I have scar tissue that serves me as a reminder for when it is right. to optimize and when it is not. So sometimes it's helpful to be ignored. Forced to solve it yourself. Yes, that's a good way to put it.

Yeah, you want to be spoon fed all the time. Forced to solve it yourself is a great, great way. Yeah, I don't feel compelled to keep asking questions because it doesn't feel like he cares about mentoring juniors. He very well could not. Often there's an expectation that staff software engineers mentor juniors. I mean, there are many staff software engineers and some of them do not. Some of them do not want to mentor juniors.

Maybe there's a lot of juniors around. Maybe he's feeling overwhelmed. I don't know. What would I suggest here? You could try a couple things. One is ask someone else. I'm assuming this person is the most knowledgeable about the code base, so most likely to understand. But most likely to know doesn't mean most likely that you will know after asking him, as you've learned.

So it's possible someone more willing to talk to you that knows less will give you a better result. another option is and here's what I think here's what I've tried here's here's why I think these two things exist yeah I don't know demonstrate some kind of effort that isn't just like I had a question I slacked you you are my question answer yeah you are the first thing I tried yeah I got stuck on this and it affects this work and I don't want to break this thing and here's what I think and if you can show effort that's different than just like teacher what is the answer to the

question. Yes, huge. I was definitely going to say the same thing, Jameson, and I was even thinking you could take that a little further. Almost the same thing. Oh, I just teed that up for you and you hit a line drive out of the park. Oh, my gosh. Okay. I was thinking you could go to the engineer and say, like if you really want to understand, let's talk about the specific situation. You really want to understand why these two variables are named differently and it seems ambiguous. change them, change their names, and say, hey, staff software engineer, I encountered these variables. If I were to change their names to the following, would that lose some important meaning in this system? And that's a question that an engineer is more likely to answer, especially if you're wrong, because people just love correcting wrong stuff.

Oh, yeah. Especially the kind of person that doesn't want to mentor a junior engineer. Yeah, that's true. I bet you do get some good PR reviews of, no, no, no, we can't do that. Yeah, you probably get some of that. So use that to your advantage. Now, the risk here is that you're going to come out looking dumb, but you're definitely going to get your question answered. Speaking of looking dumb, ask AI is an answer for many different things now. For sure. subject to many weaknesses, but one of the weaknesses is not it will give you almost the same thing as an answer. Yeah. It'll give you a lot of stuff.

Oh, tons of words that you may not understand it. It may not be true. That's right. But you will have something to think about. It will be more words. Am I the problem is he? I mean, it's probably both here a little bit. I think a more conscientious staff software engineer could give you better answer.

and it's possible a more effort and or more experience would result in better or fewer questions that were easier to answer or felt better to answer. Yeah. And knowing the kinds of questions that are worth asking, and I'll tell you, 90% of the time, maybe more than 90% of the time, if your question is, why is this named this way? Is there some deeper meaning baked into this variable name that I don't understand? nine times out of ten, the answer is, no, the developer just couldn't think of something better to call it. Yeah, that's a really good point.

We all named things so badly. So there's a subtext in my advice there, which is level up the kinds of questions you're asking. Because if the question is just why are engineers so bad at naming variables, that question doesn't have an answer. So focus on the higher level. Well, we've had a lot of practice. Yeah, that's how we got so bad at it. It's a long time to get this bad. You think you wake up with this level of bad naming skill?

No. That skill is earned. I studied the Java Enterprise Bean. I don't even know. Is it a standard library? Yeah, this is a field that called something an Enterprise Java Bean, and you're asking why the variables are named weirdly? Yeah.

Okay. I just started to use AWS bedrock mantle. And I was trying to figure out what's the difference between regular bedrock and bedrock mantle. And I think the biggest difference is someone got to say, wouldn't it be cool if we could call the thing underneath bedrock mantle like the earth? Okay. Like the crust and then the mantle? I think so.

It's below the bedrock. But also it's part of it because it's still bedrock. Oh, okay. Oh, boy. Anyways, I don't envy them. They've got a million really complicated, intense, technical things to name. Yeah. That's actually probably not that bad of one.

Have we answered the question? Yes, I think so. Almost. We almost answered it. What can people do if they want their own questions answered? Go to soft skills. com audio and click the Ask a Question button where you can fill out our form. It's a Google form.

It's really easy to fill out. And a lot of you do this every week. And to each one of you, we say thank you for filling out that form. That is what keeps this show going with wonderful questions. It gives me a reason to wake up in the morning. It's like a backlog for the soul. Yes, everyone knows that when your backlog is empty, your company dies. Yes.

We got to keep that backlog going. Oh, and we should pitch one thing, Jameson. What? We are speaking. We're both speaking at a conference. Oh, yeah. You're right. We are.

We should have pitched this months ago. Whoops. But we didn't because this is a clever marketing ploy to establish scarcity. Yeah. There's only a few weeks left until the talks happened. Yeah, and by the time this comes out, you might be paying late bird ticket prices. So our deepest apologies, no refunds. Yeah.

Well, but all part of our plan, but also sorry about the late bird tickets, but also it's somehow for your own good. Yeah, for sure. And reflects our wise marketing skills. Yes, it's definitely the case. September 18th, right? September 18th, Utah, J.S. go to UtahJS.com. Get your tickets.

Jameson is keynoting the conference. I'm giving a talk about Claudecote, and it'll be really cool. It'd be fun to see you all there. It'd be cool. Say hi if you listen and see us there. All right, thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week.