Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 65: Left In The Dust and Imposter Syndrome

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

Jamison and Dave talk about these questions: I have a great, comfortable job that doesn’t push me very hard. How do I deal with worrying about being left in the dust? How do I deal with imposter syndrome?

It takes more than great code to be a great software engineer. This is episode 65 of the soft skills engineering podcast. I'm your host, Dave Smith. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. Soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show for developers and ostriches. How did you pick ostriches? I can't tell you how my brain works. I don't know. I have to use my brain to tell you how my brain works and that's just not happening it's already untrustworthy uh ostrich meat is delicious by the way oh really yeah i had it once in in south africa does it taste like chicken no it was like a mix of chicken and steak of all the things that are not going to taste like chicken i would have expected ostrich meat do not be on that list yeah wait there are too many

negatives there yeah i totally lost it tastes like chicken point is i expected it to taste like chicken okay since it's basically a big chicken yeah yeah enough about that i think we have a comment from a listener would you like to share it with us yes um so we did a rerun a couple weeks ago and someone listened to it at least one person and they said i'm listening to the rerun which has my anonymous question on being in a two bosses situation jameson asked if i tried doing nothing to see if the problem goes away and it turns out that worked great a couple of months later the senior dev quit thanks for the advice in the meantime i did talk about it with my manager but just waiting for him to quit would have been way easier happy to help have you tried doing

nothing i'm doing that all the time yeah most of the problems in my life uh that's my that's my method for trying to solve all of them at once just do nothing yeah i'm doing nothing on so many things all at the same time i'm multitasking really well yeah you know this head in the hand or sorry hand whoa brain come on this head in the sand strategy sometimes gets a bad rap but it works pretty well until it doesn't that looks real bad yeah yep anyways i'm glad it worked out yeah congratulations should we uh do our first question yes i will read it this comes from listener joe joe writes i constantly fear that no matter how much experience i have the engineering landscape will suddenly shift and i'll be unemployed and out of touch i have

a great job that i can't enjoy because i don't feel like it pushes me to be top one percent mega dev and i worry that only the super best will find jobs in a near future can you give me any advice to get over this feeling am i the only one afraid of that so i've been reading a lot of batman comics lately to escape from reality and head in the sand yeah and and batman is a top one percent mega human but he had a lot of bad stuff happen to him he's got a pretty crappy life so i don't know it sounds like your life is way easier than batman's life the 99 is a pretty comfortable place to be yeah in some ways it is like robin for example he's in the 99 robin yeah uh i have bad news about robin oh do you know no spoilers well in the 80s robin died oh

jeez i'm a little joker killed him there's been like a couple new robins since then so uh and this all neatly relates to the question like so that's my uh yakety sax transition back to the question um hmm i have a fear that my experience in technology will be useless when the world ends and then it'll be like doctors and people that know how to fix stuff and farmers yeah and then and then i'll be like i don't know yeah i'll just be manual labor exactly i sometimes fear that like crappy manual labor because i've been my hands are weakened yeah i'm getting repetitive stress injuries do you have an ergonomic shovel that i could use

oh my gosh i do think about this sometimes i sometimes think about what would happen if suddenly the earth lost the ability to generate electricity i do too and i totally do how useless i will be in this world uh i can sort this backpack full of rocks really fast from largest to smallest on a whiteboard yeah whiteboards have been scrapped to use as armor they don't exist anymore people walking around with whiteboards on their arm as a shield yeah oh man uh so i can relate that's what i'm saying you know i totally yeah you clearly understand you understand joe's plight i do i i wake up sweaty at night thinking about it when i was in my first couple years of uh programming uh you know

my first so-called real jobs i do remember having this fear and then at some point it the fear disappeared i don't know when i can't remember i can't even remember the last time i had this fear but it was basically gone for 10 years and then a strange thing started happening over about the last five years my salary and the salary of the engineers i knew started rising very quickly i don't know if you had a similar experience jameson over the last five years or so but it seems like the whole landscape has just i mean the working life of a software developer today is so good there's all these perks it's like free food even companies that are notoriously uh stingy are providing free snacks and all kinds of perks can i rant about this for one second to

derail you oh yeah absolutely i'm gonna so i hung out this weekend with my friends from from high school who are amazing people um and and work in a variety of careers one of them is uh he works in investment banking and finance and those people work a hundred hours a week yeah for years and that's that's not hyperbole it's a real thing they work from like eight to midnight seven days a week he has young children that just like don't see him ever um and then eventually the the the the goal is it'll result in this huge financial windfall but even at the beginning when they work those hours they don't make that much money my other friend is a surgeon and he just graduated from med school uh which is why we were hanging out because it was the first time he got any

vacation since he started med school and he's going off to do his residency five six years ago uh yeah it was four years ago and then he's doing his residency which is which is five years um and then in five years we will hang out again because that's when his next vacation will be and he probably has like three hundred thousand dollars in debt he doesn't because he i don't know he did the military but most yeah most people do and and then while he's in his residency he works like 24 hour shifts and i asked him about it like what is it like do you sleep at all like is it like 24 hours on call he's like no no i'm just doing surgery for 24 hours straight and then i get a day off to recover and then i do it again and hey if i ever get surgery i want to

be like hour 23 for one doctor you know like that's me cut me open doc you've been awake for 23 hours get a sharp knife and get inside me yeah so there are people that have a different life than us that's that is the point of that yes and that is actually a hundred percent supportive of what i was about to say which is great we are in a freaking golden age and my biggest fear over the last five or six years is when will it end what will end the golden age so i think it's a little bit different for you you you will do you will end the golden age somehow the singularity yeah Yeah. But I think that's my fear has transitioned from will I become obsolete to will this industry dry up? So it's not like will the technical skills I know be replaced by some new technology that I won't be able to learn?

Exactly. And I think what's happened is that I have had to learn so many new technologies and languages and tools that I no longer fear for my ability to learn the new hotness. i now just fear that the industry will just disappear the new hotness is some machine learning thing that replaces your dev team yeah yeah yeah or somehow we get commoditized and people who are making minimum wage can do our job you know yeah yeah uh well that's scarier i was gonna answer this question very hopefully by saying it's it's fine it'll all be fine and you're saying like it's fine don't worry about that this way worse thing is coming i i actually don't know if it's coming i just feel like it's too good to be true right now do you ever get that it does feel a little surreal how how good we have it compared to a lot of

people uh to be clear those friends i talked about those are both uh very well-paying careers they're not like struggling or anything there are people that work those kind of hours and are just living in in misery in fields that are not prestigious and do not pay well right right definitely so those those apply even more to those fields yeah all the more reason for us to feel like we're in this golden age yeah like we work 40 to 50 hours a week most programmers i know except for the quants the closer you get to finance the more hours you work i think yeah also the more money you make so true true making a trade-off so let's let's go back to joe's actual question which is how do i uh prevent becoming unemployed and out of touch because

the technology landscape shifted out from under me and specifically because he's in a job he likes but he's not using the new hotness yeah so it sounds like he's worried about stagnating and then the job goes away and then he doesn't fit in right in a new place right yeah he opens the door to this new world he's been insulated in his little cocoon he steps out of the cocoon in the world has changed yeah that's a good question i've i've never worked somewhere long enough that i felt like i stagnated um and and they were always new small startups that were working with the newer technologies that i felt like pushed me to learn and solve problems and then besides the specific technologies they use just the work that we did was was interesting

and made me feel like i was growing and progressing um yeah i mean if you're really worried about it you this is potentially an argument for going solo or entrepreneurship you kind of control your destiny a little bit more um yeah it's not necessarily the route to finding lots of hard technical problems though it could be depending on how you end up doing it but if you want to be successful that's much more a business problem than a technical problem yeah if you want to get exposed to lots of new technologies though in a short period of time that's yeah yeah pretty good just working as a freelancer is a great way to do that but you're giving up a lot of other things you're trading you're making trade-offs you

might want to make or you might not want to make so i was at one job for about seven years and at this job we used to c++ which as far as i was concerned at the time was basically a dead-end programming language uh c++ has since kind of blossomed um this was about seven years ago uh the new c++ 11 came out and you know there's a lot of people using it to do cool stuff but i felt like it was a dead end and we were using qt um which is a great framework for building uh user interfaces on desktop applications but i just felt like uh like this is all i am i'm just the qt expert you know yeah yeah so i quit my job and i found a company who was willing to hire me despite the fact that i had zero experience with their technology i mean i had a little they were

running on python and and javascript and i i had dabbled in those languages but they hired me based on my aptitude and then i ramped up on those languages quickly and became effective and so i think you have to find the right company because there are companies out there who hire for just a the correct laundry list of skills on your resume you know it's like well we need five years of java and we need two years of ruby and that's anyone who doesn't meet that criteria can't work here and there are i think a lot of companies like that and i think it's a really bad way to hire engineers but yeah so you'll have to avoid those companies um but there are also a lot of companies who are willing to hire you based on aptitude your understanding of fundamentals and

your ability to be a great developer which they think they can measure through an interview process um which is cute but i've rubbed off on you but uh um i don't even know where i was going with that but yeah basically it can happen you can become a little bit stagnant and you'll but but as long as you stay sharp on your fundamentals i think that um there will be a place for you yeah so this is this is that's about staying personally um up to date by working at a place that that helps you do that what about if the industry does shift so there was the big dot-com bubble in 2000 um were you working then

i wasn't no i was in college okay this man we need someone even even wiser than us no there's no such thing clearly but uh i would love to hear what it was like at that time i mean from just secondhand accounts it sounds like this kind of did happen to a lot of people where a lot of jobs dried up and people um it was a pretty frothy market and then it suddenly wasn't well i was on i was on the job market uh during the bust in 2003 and um i interviewed at like eight or nine companies and only got one job offer and i was fresh out of college of course but i i don't feel like it was any different than than it is today i don't feel like having a particular set of skills or sorry a particular set of like technologies or languages on your resume gave

you much of an edge up it was more like we're just looking for great engineers and we have a selection process for finding them so yeah i don't know i i don't based on my experience interviewing today and my experiences interviewing in 2003 i don't really sense a significant difference here's okay here's some advice i i haven't personally experienced this feeling but i feel like um any sense of security i have in my career is half because of my technical skills and half because of relationships i have with people so i i feel confident i can learn new things if if suddenly um like triple sequel instead of no sequel becomes the new phrase or whatever all sequel whatever yeah i'll learn that uh but also i just i have friends and and i have people i like that i've

worked with and and i'm confident that among all those people someone would be able to help me find work so that might be a better hedge than than worrying about specific technology just worry about um having good friends and then yeah yeah it sounds good hopefully hopefully not all of them are in the same boat all at the same time yeah all my friends are no sequel experts in that industry just blew up yeah well you need to have a diversified portfolio of exactly yeah you need to talk to people that aren't just they don't just do the exact same thing you do like for example if my surgeon friend ever needs an apprentice i'm sure that my ability to type would perfectly correlate to the ability to like hold the colon or whatever they do in there i don't know

that's what they do yeah so i have seen people um totally different uh different observation here i have seen people become victims of this phenomenon but it's not because of a particular skill set or technology it's because of a company so over the years i've interviewed people who have spent a long time at one company 15 to 20 years at a single company and when i interview them somehow i get the sense that they are able to get things done at their company but it and the reason they're successful there is because they know how the company works and those skills are often not super transferable it's like oh yeah i know i know janet over in marketing and i know how to get this done or i know bob over there and you know in accounting or on this other engineering team or

whatever and it's like all those connections i know the right palms to grease yeah and like all these connections and the culture and the processes you've you've mastered them at this company and you have stopped becoming good at engineering and you've started becoming good at your company and if you sense that's happening i think that is is actually a slump you really should worry about but it's not something that happens in one year two years or even 10 years it seems to be from my limited experience i've probably seen this in half a dozen interview candidates about the 15 to 20 year point is where i sense that they are good at their company but not good at engineering anymore interesting so quit your job yeah that's i was gonna say that that's

the sum total of the advice quit early what you have it oh man i did it again we always write notes and sometimes i like read them and then subconsciously steal dave's notes and edit this part out no way it's it's strange though because i think that our parents generation um if you'd say that if i had told my parents that it was actually disadvantageous to stay at one company as an engineer for too long they would be like what that's that doesn't make any sense yeah anyway here we are different world all right has the question been answered oh one more thing um i would worry a lot less about particular technologies

and particular languages i would focus on fundamentals and your ability to learn new things and sometimes your company will provide those opportunities automatically and sometimes they won't and you'll have to do them on your own but your ability to learn new things is the number one skill as an engineer that you need to be successful i think well besides of course having diversified friends it's all about schmoozing just schmooze it up it's such a gross word yeah okay question is answered yep let it be written uh i'll read the next question this question is about imposter syndrome which by the way we get a lot of questions about um that's a that's a thing uh i'm a software developer post-graduate during college i won

a lot of small programming competition rose to the top of the class and it opened up a lot of contract work for me before i even earned my degree a lot of the contracts threw me in the deep end but somehow everything seemed to work out i often get told i trivialize my achievements and programming ability but i'm very aware of my limitations i'm quite sure i suffer from imposter syndrome and in the coming months i will be demanding and above the norm salary for entry level programming work due to my qualifications and achievements i'm not sure how i feel about this or if i'm just underestimating my abilities question have you ever experienced imposter syndrome and how do you cope with it there's a lot to that question yeah yeah first of all

congratulations for doing well in school sounds sounds great yeah working and going to school at the same time is also not the easiest thing sounds like you've been able to do that and you've gotten some some real world experience which is really cool yeah i've never done a programming competition is it like hacker rank is it like all those uh code wars or all those sites but just like you do it in a fixed time limit or something i i've seen that done uh i think the acm does that where i can't even remember but i remember seeing other kids in my cs program doing that i don't know they like lock you in a room and you have to write code yeah just kidding that's so nerdy what a bunch of nerds they're programming um that's what i imagine it to be

which, uh, that's cool that you won. Um, maybe that will help you like get interviews at Google or something, but I imagine it won't help that much in the work you do. Well, unless he learned how to sabotage his coworkers code, that can be a valuable skill. There's a skill. Huh? Uh, so imposter syndrome, imposter, I'm an imposter at speaking English imposter syndrome. Jameson is actually not a native English speaker, it turns out. He's been faking it this whole time. My native tongue is mumble. So, Jameson, if I'm not mistaken, I think you have suffered from imposter syndrome yourself.

Yeah. Maybe even 30 minutes ago. 30 minutes ago I did, yes. As recently as 30 minutes ago. What about yourself, Dave? i do not think i have suffered from imposter syndrome i don't know why but when people describe the feelings of imposter syndrome i it's not something that i would it's not words i would use to describe my feelings what does it feel like i was thinking about this like what

what does that even mean and this is like a hot topic in i don't know you go to every developer conference and there's a talk about imposter syndrome i don't watch any of them because they just like stress me out more um so you're like i'm not a very good imposter probably someone has a better definition of this than i do but i think for me the feeling that i identify as imposter syndrome comes from a mismatch between what i think i know and can do and what other people expect me to know and do uh it's not just comparing myself to other people like oh that person writes code faster or slower or whatever it's like they have this standard that they this implicit standard that they are measuring me by and and i am not matching up to it and it's always

implicit if someone tells me here's the expectations we have for you i'm totally fine uh evaluating myself against them saying like oh i need to get better at this but it's it's all this implicit cultural understanding that is unspoken that i feel like everyone is silently disappointed with me for not meeting huh so would you say it's self-inflicted yeah oh for sure yeah i mean there are things people can do to make it worse uh they don't really work on me anymore because i'm i've grown old and crusty i'm 30 so i'm pretty experienced you're so old yeah old nerd i don't know you always hear about um feigning surprise like what you don't know that you know like yeah I don't care about that crap anymore.

I love learning new stuff. So if someone does that, I'm like, yeah, I don't know it. Now I do, and it's awesome. But I know that can really bother lots of people. What else is a big thing? That's the main one that springs to mind, but I know there are other things people do. So you sense that you have limitations, and you sense that people think you don't have limitations, or that your limits are higher than they actually are in some way.

Yes. and then you apply this uh this like this artificial but nevertheless very real feeling expectation on yourself yeah that is a shorter way to describe it and how does it manifest like is it just an inner anxiety that you feel or does it actually have uh yeah just a lot of poetry notebooks full of it deep and passionate scribblings um that's a good question how does it manifest i think it's just stress for me i just feel stressed out when i when i feel it it's a source of stress um have you ever felt like you uh like your salary causes you to have imposter syndrome because i think that's one of the question askers

comments here is he's gonna ask for a normal salary no i think nervous i think the way i you salary is like utterly disconnected from how good i am at my job uh because i've seen so many people get paid in a way that is disconnected from how good they are at their job so to me salary is like a game you play to make money and then the work you do is kind of separate from that um so so yeah oddly no raises or or pay level has never caused me to feel imposter syndrome them it's never like am i worth what they're paying me like well yeah because otherwise they wouldn't pay you i don't know it's it's more the only thing that matters is they think you are yeah but do you ever worry that they'll find out that you're not as good as they thought and then

maybe cut your pay or fire you nope never do don't know why golden age it's a golden age yeah i guess so yeah it's it's because let's find another job yeah a fresh little baby that has never experienced hardship or trials in work yeah the financial part hasn't come into it for me it's more it's more interacting with people i think the answer to it though is you just got to embrace it and own it and pretend like you're a spy you're like a a secret agent who has infiltrated the programmers and you are literally being an imposter like trying to convince them that you can not really sure if you're joking about that but i like the ownership i'm joking when you said embrace it i actually um i actually like that so i don't know that's probably showed

up on a slide somewhere in a talk about imposter syndrome embrace the imposter syndrome embrace it but i don't mean embrace the syndrome i mean embrace your limits some of the engineers that are the most comfortable for me to work with are those who say oh i screwed up or um they basically acknowledge their mistakes they're what some people use the term vocally self-critical and when i am that way about myself i think it really takes a lot of the pressure off you know it's like oh you're not perfect great none of us are perfect let's just clear the air about that yeah yeah yeah you'll see these like giant twitter threads where where someone will start admitting some mistake they made as a developer something they don't know

and and it's cathartic for lots of people because they feel like yeah it's like you said it's it's okay to show things you don't know or areas you're not an expert in i think some people react to imposter syndrome by like putting on this armor of arrogance they just like try and compensate for it by by trying to make themselves feel even more infallible oh wow that seems like the opposite of i mean that's gonna amplify the imposter syndrome yeah yeah but then like i don't know it's i don't i'm not saying it's a good idea i'm just saying i've seen it yeah yeah yeah don't do that because that sucks it's no fun to work with and like people have a lot of patience for uh genuine inquiries um people have less patience for for pretending to know stuff you don't

in like a snooty way oh boy that's so little patience for that yeah yeah that'll that'll gets you called out by a lot more people than saying i didn't know that that's how sequel worked or whatever thing you think is like dumb that you don't know uh i think another approach people take is they get how do i say this they be gentle jameson just kidding let her rip it's like they're they're they're trying to admit they're an imposter by like admitting all their weaknesses but they do it in a way that's like cringing instead of saying like i don't know that and i'll learn it it's like i am weak i don't know okay um and that's hard to work i don't know if i've seen someone do that it's demotivating to work with people that respond in that way it's

really motivating to work with people that are excited to learn and then to grow their skills but if you're just like well i i heard imposter syndrome is bad so i want to like admit right away i don't know stuff and and then you let that i feel like such a hippie talking about this i want to say the phrase negative energy what does that even mean oh yeah i'm struggling to describe the distinction though you're you're really bumming me out man yeah it's it's like all your negative energy it's like you're confusing um being down to earth with like a lack of self-confidence or honesty with a lack of self-confidence i don't know hmm so it's like being self-critical is one thing being self-loathing is yeah a worse thing you did it you saved me dave words words the words

yeah yeah do that okay cool well i feel like you're a scientist studying this phenomenon like what is this strange thing this thing that doesn't it doesn't exist in my universe yeah it really doesn't i don't know what the heck it is i i just never really felt like i was faking it or maybe i just can't remember and maybe this goes away with time i don't know i don't know you'll do fine that's the answer yeah yeah jameson believes in you you can't be an imposter it's i think this is a very subtle and difficult thing and uh clearly a lot of people suffer from it so you're not alone that's one thing we can say for sure and uh oh here's okay here's what you do you know how sometimes public speaking advisors say imagine the audience is in their

underwear yeah that's the weirdest why is that even advice i i don't know it's the dumbest thing but now instead next time when you start your first job imagine if all your co-workers and your manager are all suffering from imposter syndrome more intensely than you okay maybe that will help yeah maybe how is that related to underwear it's just imagining other people being oh you're like okay you're like i will use the power of my mind to change yeah the situation to when i'm less worried about which is like speaking in front of a giant group of people still but they're all nearly nude that would that would scare me way more imagine you walk into a conference and everyone's in their underwear like that'd be horrifying yes and not in like a

human body's way but just like what has happened in the world that this is like a social norm did i yeah exactly i mean it's a memo that the social norms are changing i'm in some bizarro twilight universe and other weird stuff don't worry jim isn't it'll make you perfectly comfortable behind the microphone yeah it would not it would not do that also gravity is reversed and don't worry about that either we all wear these magnetic boots to keep us on the ground which is also that's right metal for some reason yeah lots of weird stuff the universe has been retconned so i'm pretty sure that all of these techniques will help you in your imposter syndrome now that we've helped you so much yeah good heavens i think for me the one thing that has

helped me to not have imposter syndrome is to realize that the wizard master programmer who never ships bugs and knows everything simply doesn't exist and the more i interact with programmers day to day even the ones who i hold in very high esteem and i see their mistakes and i and i find out about areas that they're ignorant of i realize hey we're all we're all on this um like roller coaster ride of of progressing and learning and just because someone happens to have some notoriety or more experience doesn't really make them any any better or worse than me in this area of their confidence and ability to be an engineer are there better engineers yes absolutely um but that doesn't mean that everyone expects me to be this wizard like they all have

their own insecurities and weaknesses as well and they're probably not even thinking about yours yeah so that's probably the best advice i can give one more point we talked a little bit about um asking questions but i feel like one thing we didn't say is that openly and honestly asking questions i think is a is is an easier way to win respect and admiration from peers than pretending you know stuff oh my gosh yes so good yeah it's it it just shows like this genuine desire to learn which is which is admirable i think so yeah yeah and the only thing holding you back from asking questions is often the fear that your ignorance will be apparent right yeah which i mean it will be at some point and it's better to ask a question at the beginning than like the meeting where

you're presenting on the thing that you were supposed to do that you didn't do because you didn't know how to do it and you were too scared to ask a question about it so now the only thing you have is to imagine everyone is in their underwear yep and get through this meeting and the horror just gives you this adrenaline rush yeah exactly all right i think that's a great point really good thanks i love it when i sit down with new engineers and they just ask me tons and tons of questions it shows me that they're learning and not once have i ever sat down with a new engineer like this listener and had them ask me a bunch of questions and thought oh wow what a dummy yeah there's never yeah but i will say it sometimes i sit down with new

engineers and they start making assertions or statements that they think are true that are false or telling me how things work and it's not true that's when i go oh geez come on you need to ask more questions yep so all right that can help question addressed question imposterized where we didn't even talk about the imposter syndrome inherent in making a podcast where we like sagely dispense advice to other people as if we know anything at all wait are you saying we're not wise sages uh the ages i use the wise sage of the age um filter when i edit these podcasts so by the time they come out yeah we're good don't worry you should you should hear the crap that gets it doesn't get through the post-production

if you think this is bad uh it's usually just a lot of babies screaming in the background it does yeah that's true you know it does actually take a certain degree of arrogance to put on a podcast like this but i i think that i think javison and i've been pretty clear from the beginning that we don't really have all the answers but we share the experiences that we do have and in the hopes that they'll be beneficial to someone and our mothers keep saying us that they love the show yeah you know so i'm not an imposter my mom likes it no she wouldn't like me if i were an imposter so she has very high standards for who she'll take as a child yeah all right question has been answered it is time to talk about how people can get their

questions answered go hit us up on our website at softskills.audio and click the ask a question button and we would love to hear your questions questions are flowing in at an unprecedented rate um of literally once per week which means actually no it's more like once per day which means we're unable to keep up with all of them and answer them all but we still love hearing them all and we will eventually answer them all even if we have to retire from our day jobs and do this you know full time and some of them kind of influence other questions we pick like we've had several questions about imposter syndrome uh and it's not that i don't know we didn't like the other ones it's just like okay we we should do an imposter syndrome question because we have a lot

of them yeah it's like some kind of critical mass happens and we go okay this is clearly a hot topic so if you don't think your question is worthy of being answered you should write in because um if enough of you do on one topic we will blab about it for 20 minutes what else could you want yep so softskills.audio is the website to go do that and please we'd love to hear it also if you are a question asker and your question has been answered please use that same form like our listener did today to let us know how your situation turned out we love hearing about the good the bad and the ugly if you took our advice if you rejected our advice we want to hear about it no matter what and if you like the show please share it with people we we would love

it if more people listened more i think we have more listeners right isn't aren't the numbers creeping up they're creeping creeping upward yep uh creeping is the best way i'd like my podcast to be described so on that note i think we'll end it we'll catch you next week all right thanks