Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 68: Paying Your Dues and Non-technical Hobbies

Episode Date: July 13, 2017

Jamison and Dave answer these questions: It’s been a year and I still haven’t touched the codebase. What should I do? All my hobbies revolve around computers. How do I develop other interests? Jamison mentioned Dan Luu’s article on how bad teams are always hiring. Here it is. Rich Hickey’s Hammock-Driven Development talk was also mentioned.

it takes more than great code to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering the podcast i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where developers write in with questions and we provide answers it really works for developers as well as the occasional bovine emus are last week we just decided they weren't worth it we didn't get very good social lift from them so social lift maybe we're yeah okay this is our marketing strategy find the animal demographic that has the biggest social media presence we'll just mention them in the intro and then we'll we'll just take off that's got to be like very small dogs i think you're right i think that demographic is pretty easily

identified dogs cats are are nice but they're they're not very they don't share a lot you know so they'll just like chuckle to themselves but dogs will like yell to all their friends about it uh we had a comment from a listener we had an episode a while back about keeping meetings on track and grant wrote in and said i'm a developer speaker manager and i attend toastmasters one of the best things I've learned from Toastmasters is how to run a meeting right. I didn't expect to learn that, but the key of a meeting is the agenda, which allows you to identify the moment you're off schedule. It's not hard to have a meeting itinerary and it keeps you on schedule and everyone is expected to keep it, even junior developers. I'll toast to that. I've never been

to Toastmasters and I've heard so many people, especially around public speaking and the tech conference circuit, talk about Toastmasters. You know that Simpsons episode where they go to the illuminati or is it the masons it's the masons yeah that's yeah in my head that's what toast no they were called the stone cutters the stone cutters yeah anyways i imagine the toast master meetings to be a lot like those simpsons like stone cutter meetings i don't know why just how it is in my head like a cult uh yeah that sounds pretty negative now that i say that out loud thanks for telling us about your creepy cult grant i always imagine people standing up with a wine glass and then dinging it with a fork a few times and then giving a speech oh i think that's

the image they're going for with the name i'm pretty sure that's deliberate i think it works built right in um that's that's interesting someday i'll go to one and be disabused of my terrible stereotypes because i have heard a lot of people say it really helped them get more comfortable speaking in public which is a valuable skill in a lot of different fields sure yeah i've always wanted to attend for probably 10 years i've wanted to attend but uh i only do things that are easy um we'll just maybe they make house visits house calls the toast master meeting is at dave's house we'll come to you i was really enjoying this tv show uh maybe i'll maybe i'll drop by next time

it's at my house that idea of an agenda for a meeting has has come up i've heard that a lot and i think uh i well i don't think i've ever seen one rigidly followed ever i have been in meetings that there was a loose agenda but i've never been in one where it was like we kept to the agenda it always was like a loose thesis for the meeting and then it went wherever it went oh so true meetings are a gas they will expand to fill the fate the space they're given on the calendar yeah you know it's like you need like an acceptance criteria or an exit criteria it's like once we've reached this point you may leave we may all leave this room yeah that's i don't know i've seen it happen once in a while i i once i there was a program manager running a meeting

at work uh just a few weeks ago and and she said okay we've met our objective you can all have your time back and everyone was like looking at each other like what do we do what is this i guess we go do our other work i could see that being especially helpful for regular meetings where oh yeah otherwise they'll just keep going through inertia you know oh yeah there's always more to talk about right yeah everyone out of things the meeting has always been an hour so we will be here for an hour usually an hour and five minutes yeah all right okay i think i'll read our first question how's that that sounds great oh and yes sorry thanks grant that was great comment uh okay this comes from an anonymous listener hi there long time fan of the show really

appreciate the thought and effort you two bring to the table when answering audience questions that was a very nice thing to say yeah thank you i'm just flexing the whole time we're recording this show it's a lot of effort just like quit your job and get into one i'm really sweaty by the end okay let me get to the meat here i was fortunate enough to land a job after graduation late last summer as a software engineer with a good company in an exciting field however after nearly a year of working here i have yet to touch the code base of my team's applications instead i have worked on what i would consider support tasks such as continuous integration continuous deployment

shell scripts and documentation i have brought up my desire to code in a one-on-one with my team lead which resulted in promises of future development work yet all potential tasks have either been reassigned to other senior team members or dropped altogether while i understand that being a new developer involves paying your dues and doing the tasks no one else wants i am at the point where i feel as though i was misled in the interview and hiring process it is as if i am a software engineer who does not write software beyond the classic advice of just quit do you have any other advice for how i should proceed dang it he's preempted us really took the wind out of our sails there he or she they don't say who they are we don't want to presume

everyone can be in crappy jobs everyone can be marginalized yep um if you have to write bash scripts and documentation and you really want to write software the key is to write software that writes documentation in bash scripts you just build these byzantine castles of complexity like think about how you could write a static type system for the english language and then do that and then type check your documentation or uh i mean haskell has a bunch of like there's this parsec library in haskell that's really good for parsing and and grammars and you could write a grammar for bash and then statically type check your bash scripts and oh you could re-implement haskell in bash yeah and then then do that and then self host it after that um you're on track

here yeah anyways just just no one can stop you from writing code just right only you can stop you from writing code yeah and if anyone asks you why you haven't deployed their stuff just say you're writing a system that will take maybe a little bit longer but after that it'll save a bunch of time forever oh alternatively if you build enough automation you could just stop coming to work and people won't notice right if it just keeps doing the job that you've been doing by hand yeah or you can come to work but you just don't work like you just wander the halls just hang out at people's desks with a cup of coffee and then when they get bored of you being there or annoyed go to someone else's desk um that only works for extroverts jameson yeah that's true for introverts

you can just play solitaire if it's if it's a tech company you say it's an exciting company in an exciting field that probably means they have like a ping pong table and vr rooms and i don't know they have all those like developer child toys so you could just go hang out with those or or look don't quit your job automate yourself out of a job keep the job keep getting paid for the job go get another job get two paychecks at once meanwhile your old job you just keep it humming along just keep the lights on on your automation yeah boom yeah um and i mean you've come to the right place clearly okay okay when you say exciting field we all know the only exciting field is is ai so if they're upset at you for automating your job they're kind of being a

little hypocritical um then you need to go on the offensive and automate their jobs and get them all fired and replaced by your automation and then you're really dogfooding it there uh look you need to shut up or i'm gonna automate you out of the job too you just keep this quiet buddy nice job that can't be done by a computer you got there it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it so i worked at a company uh and i won't i won't name it because i'm gonna say a lot of bad things about them um i worked at a company do not open jameson's linkedin profile right now i don't even know if it's on there so you might not even find it uh i worked at a company that preyed on um technical students so they weren't graduates

they were all students still of a local university computer science or it or uh the thing that was formerly called isis before that became a terrorist organization um i think they call it information systems now oh i wondered about that yeah those poor people that told everyone they studied isis um anyways all these students that didn't have a ton of experience they they couldn't really get jobs anywhere but they were really interested in programming and they just like plastered the school with flyers and attacked all the career fairs dangling this promise in front of them that you can come work here learn the system pay your dues a little bit and then you'll be able to program and work on this this software and there were programmers there you could see

that they existed and potentially feel like you could work your way up there but the whole time i was there i never saw anyone so i i worked there under that promise right and there are a bunch of other people there the same time under the same promise no one ever made it from non-developer to developer though oh they all either quit or were there for just years and years and never ever wrote a line of code they were all in support or data entry uh i don't think any of them even moved to sales it was all support or data entry oh man so that's the worst case where i don't know if it was deliberate or not i suspect it was deliberate but uh that can definitely happen it can definitely be a bait and switch um where the job you think you

are working towards will never come and they're just taking advantage of your your optimism to use you for cheap labor i hope that is not the case but but i tell that story to say that i have seen it um this place was not a good company in an exciting field though it was a terrible company in a horrible field um so hopefully it's not the same i work at a terrible company in a horrible field however we are hiring oh that reminds me of dan lu's article about um the market for programmers he has this spiel in it about how um bad bad teams are always hiring because people always quit their teams so like if you just take a random job he proposes that the odds are it's a crappy team in a bad company oh really oh that's interesting i think i read that yeah it's

suddenly not super related but very interesting and i will link it okay oh man so i've told scary stories what do you have dave how can we help this person um well okay i'm thinking back over my job history and i'm trying to think if i was ever trapped in a situation where i had where i felt like i had to pay my dues where something was withheld from me and i haven't i don't feel like i've been in a situation where the company expected me to earn a particular status to be able to work on something that i shouldn't be allowed to work on until they perceive that i've paid my dues you know what i mean really i mean i believe you but pretty pretty much most of the companies i've worked for have been small enough that they

didn't really have the luxury you know of of being able to hire an engineer paying them an engineer salary and then saying write our docs yeah yeah i don't know i mean so this wrote this listener already said that they they talked to their technical lead in fact multiple times and the technical lead made promises but it's not happening and that's the point where i would probably give them one more chance and say you're making it hard for me to work here like i want to work on this stuff but you're giving me crap jobs and i'm you're making it hard to stay yeah and a year doesn't an ultimatum a year doesn't feel like that that feels like a reasonable amount of time to to wait i mean especially if it's a large company that there's there's kind of bureaucracy and

it's harder to things are less flexible it's harder to move around so i i can see there being some ramp up like we need to have this person learn the systems do helpful work in a low risk way. Sure. But a year feels like a long time to ramp up. Yes, it really does. And so I, oh, go ahead. I was going to say in those conversations, you might want to start by saying, why, why am I not working on these things? Instead of saying, I want to, and I'm saying, okay, we will, you should say why and make them give you an explanation because it's incongruous to think that they hired you. And then a year later, they're not really having you do the things that you thought you were being hired for so i think they should have to answer that question yeah if you don't want to

quit your job um if it's a large enough company you you might be able to move teams a lot easier than uh quit it quit your job and get a new one well it might not be easier but it would allow you to work in the exciting field at the good company still because it might really just be the team maybe maybe everyone on the team is very senior except you and so there's this weird like non-deliberate power dynamic thing going on where they have this low status work someone has to do it everyone else's air quotes too important which i think is dumb and wrong but i could see how that might happen inadvertently and if you go to a team that's more deliberate about how they assign work or just more uh diverse in terms of experience levels then that problem might resolve itself

also it's kind of like a quit your job light put your team and get a new one quit your team i wouldn't let this go much longer though if i were you yeah i mean if you are like two three years out of college and you still really haven't written any software you're setting yourself up for long-term failure i think well it's gonna be hard to recover i don't know if they they didn't say where they worked but if it's like one of those big name tech companies they'll they'll be fine it doesn't matter if you wrote shell scripts at apple if you say i worked at apple then whatever so you'll get a bunch of job offers and then you'll go let's figure out how to actually do it they're like oh we need someone with apple shell script experience yeah well you don't say

you only wrote shell scripts oh right so your next challenge might be how to market your otherwise awful experience um one more thing i want to talk about here is this idea i even mentioned it of low status work including things like documentation um which i think is how it's generally perceived i i wish that's not how it was perceived because uh i feel like documentation is usually undervalued i don't think it's low value people just don't like doing it so they dump it on others but i've benefited enormously from both reading documentation and writing documentation um i don't think that's a thing my answer isn't like take the stuff you hate and make yourself like it um but it's more about this general idea in software that documentation is is not important

or not the cool part of writing software like there's these brave intrepid explorers on the front lines building things and then these like lowly peasants that come after and document it i think that leads to um crappy documentation and worse software maybe that's a case you could make is you could say, as a, I would do a lot better at my documentation job if I were actually implementing the system I was documenting. Or like, if this is so important, the team should be doing it. I shouldn't be, I'm the least experienced person here, and documentation should be shared among the team

so that the people who know more about how it works write the documentation, and yeah, yeah, maybe that is a good answer. That's when your team lead goes, oh, young one, it's actually not important. Yeah. yeah yeah well hmm tough call man but i i would not let this one go much longer like i i'm a very impatient developer if i get stuck in a job that i really dislike especially if it's not what was sold to me during the interview process i will not stick around that long you know after a year

i'm gonna start looking that's just me yeah and i know jameson is too i don't have a job so i can't quit one that's true i i think all right i mean yeah there's it's hard to know where the balance is but i think you're well within your rights to to at least bring it up more forcefully and try and change your change how your team works or change your team or change your life yep but i would get i would get pretty aggressive about it there really shouldn't be this thing this pay your dues you know there we we talk so much about code reviews and unit tests and continuous integration all of these things are safety nets to prevent less experienced developers well frankly and experienced developers but nevertheless

they make it a safe place for someone without experience to come in and and actually work on the system and be productive so it's like if you're not willing to use your safety net to let your new developers contribute then what's the point you know so this just shouldn't this situation should not exist in my in my opinion there may be some details i don't know but nah probably not no probably not all right have we answered the question question answered all right i will read the next question this is from an anonymous listener i've been told the secret to not burning out regularly is to have hobbies that aren't computer related as the typical nerd i've always enjoyed spending time around computers growing up and had few friends now that i'm older

i find that my hobbies all revolve around computers and programming i want to get into other things because spending 40 hours a week programming makes it a lot less enjoyable as a hobby what are your hobbies outside of computers and how did you pick them that is a great question on so many levels i love this question yeah yeah me too um do you do you believe this question asker about the secret to not burning out uh no really uh do hobbies help you not burn out i mean i guess at some level yes but i think there are more important things that prevent burnout like if you have a terrible demanding high stress job no amount of uh knitting is going to help you not burn out at that job i work a hundred hours a week and instead of sleeping the rest of my

time goes into hobbies and it really helps prevent burnout i have a good work hobby balance i i do think hobby having diverse hobbies is a good idea though and maybe it can contribute to avoiding burnout i think it helps um to have a life outside of work i think hobbies outside of work help me recharge and get perspective on the the magnitude of my problems and how i can still be a happy complete person even if things at work are going crappily i also get a lot of benefit from not working i think i work better when i when i take a lot of time away from computers and away from technical things because my brain is just turning away on stuff on the back end uh have you seen that hammock driven development talk by rich hickey uh no i haven't it's a good

one it's basically the thesis is basically like your brain thinks about stuff while your consciousness is not thinking about stuff and if you just go chill in a hammock for a while um after approaching some hard problem you might come up with the solution a lot quicker when you go to attack it next i think that applies to a very specific class of problems yeah you know like many of the problems we solve it's like i need to figure out how to use this api no amount of hammocking is going to like give you the serendipitous moment where you have to read the api doc that's true but but tricky problems that you don't know how to solve i think those absolutely enormously absolutely or even like things that you do but i've thought of better

ways to do stuff in the shower plenty of times you know oh yeah so so often in fact yeah shower showering is a great hobby it's um that's on the list i it's kind of these non-linear things where it's not just like do you follow follow this step of the sequence of steps um yeah anyways i believe this question asker i think i think they're on to something and i also think that having hobbies outside of the computer just makes you a better rounded person in general so you're saying regardless of the impact it has on your work yeah well good idea i want to be careful here because i do know some people who they they just love programming the most and they program at work and then they go home and program at home and it's so it's it's not like oh go ahead

sorry i'm laughing because i know this one really good friend of mine programmer and i actually interviewed and hired him at a job over 10 years ago uh before i knew him and then i read on his resume at the bottom it said i do rock climbing and mountain biking and a few other outdoor activities and then after knowing him for five years i said hey you're i know you pretty well now and your resume said mountain biking and rock climbing i don't think you've ever done that he goes um i did him once i just put him on there because my some guidance counselor said that i would look more well-rounded oh geez he was just a programmer like a hundred percent of his free time was programming yeah and there are people like that um and there's also this some pressure

from these like super broey uh tech leaders who are like you need passion man you have to live and breathe code and like they what what they mean when they say that usually is i want someone who is so excited about the work that i don't have to pay them very much or treat them very well um but but like being passionate about code and doing it as a hobby is is great if that's your thing you shouldn't feel pressure to do it i think it can help you a lot in the beginning of your career because there's a lot to learn and you you're competing a little not competing but it's you have to show value in a different way i think and that's one of the ways but uh the the point of this all is like if your thing is programming and that's your jam and

that's what you want to do when you get home from work i i don't know that you should feel you should explore other stuff but you shouldn't feel pressure to not program because it's like shameful or something i don't know do the stuff that you're interested in yeah totally agree totally agree so what hobbies do you have jameson what hobbies do i have so i was writing down a list of hobbies and i realized they're almost all entirely solitary um i play the guitar every once while but not for people i play it for myself uh i play video games i some of them are online so i'm playing with other people well i don't know if you could call them people some of them some of the some of the things i interact with are pretty vile uh other entities but sometimes

they're just single player games um i snowboard a lot but i don't always go with friends i go by myself a lot um interesting i i ride a motorcycle and usually that's by myself sometimes my wife will go with me uh i go to the gym a lot i enjoy that a lot and i will go weeks or months without saying a word to anyone else in the gym and like my greatest fear is to have someone come up and start talking to me at the gym and expect me to like exercise with them like no no that's not why i'm here go away hey could you could you spot me bro yeah i mean i do because that's etiquette but like people some people have gym buddies you know and they like pump each other up and and be like let's do 4 000 sets of bicep curls bro yeah and like no no i go i go to be alone in my in my zen

alone with my with my weights yep and just me and gravity just barbells and chalk and and dubstep it's the only place i listen to dubstep uh i really like reading which is also very solitary um but partially because i have realized i have so many solitary hobbies i have started playing dungeons and dragons recently which is super fun and it's it's like intensely social um more than most things i've ever done in my life um because you're like improving with a group of people so you really have to be vulnerable how is like and i don't know how is this other person's character going to react to this or what should i do in this situation to help the party or if you're the dungeon master like how can i help them tell an interesting

story what do they what do they think is an interesting story like what do they want out of this how can i support that so that's that's my one attempt to try and do something more less less solitary i guess that's awesome how has that been for you getting less solitary um good i mean it also involves a lot of solitary time reading stuff about it so i don't know it it's actually interesting this is a huge tangent but it feels like when i first got into programming where there's this world and culture and there's there's just you can kind of glimpse a little piece of it and know that there's this huge expanse beyond what you can see um of of different programming languages or fields of software development or kinds of

developers or like there's just so much out there um and dnd feels a little bit that same way because i'm like i don't know i've read fantasy my whole life so i know a lot of the tropes but the game is like 40 or 50 years old and people have been writing and talking about how they do it that whole time so there's just this huge body of knowledge out there to explore which i feel fascinating that's awesome well shall i share my hobbies please do well i like haskell just kidding that's actually not true i've never written haskell really so i just say that to sound smart well hanging up just kidding uh okay so there was a here my hobby so i was into model airplanes for quite a while for about five or six years that's super fun but i always flew with

friends i never went alone so that's interesting counterpoint to jameson um then i kind of faded away from model aviation and i got into road biking which i'm still into but i only go on long bike rides with a group i hate riding alone so there you go uh i sing i sing in a church choir which i do in a group never alone um i like to go to the theater but also like like uh musicals and opera well i haven't done opera but um musicals uh broadway style stuff i love doing that and i never go alone and uh i also consider my children a hobby i guess they're more like a more like a full-time job but i mean so much of my time gets sunk into taking care of and tending children yeah but anyway um so yeah that's very interesting how your hobbies are all solitary

and mine are all group oriented yeah i think i'm an introvert i think you are an extrovert i mean i guess i didn't mention any technical stuff i i like hanging out with developers i'll go to meetups or conferences or sure all that all that stuff there's a bunch of technical things in there but who cares about that yeah that's not i think that was exactly the point of this this question yeah so yeah i think as an engineer um many so jameson i'm so i was surprised in your list of hobbies there was nothing involving building anything like or fixing things i don't know do you like do maintenance on your motorcycle there's no no i'm garbage at that no i break stuff when i try and fix stuff on my motorcycle like a lot of people i knew who are into model aviation

they liked it because it was like building things but with a totally different set of rules from programming so you could still get your building outlet but it's like now you have to understand lift and drag and center of gravity and bernoulli's principle and thrust and all that stuff and it it was a new way to build things under totally different constraints which was really fun for me So I think, I think I kind of think about weightlifting like that a little bit, but instead of building a, a, an object, you're like building your skills and your, your muscles and stuff. Cause there's a ton of technique in it.

Um, and, and then there's also a lot of like mythology that you have to decipher to figure out what's just like some dude with good genes making stuff up and what's, what will work for you, a regular human. Yeah. Um, but, but there's this, there's also this sense of progression. I think that's one of my favorite things about it is like, if you keep doing it and you keep trying and you, you figure out eating and, and technique and stuff, numbers will go up. Like it just happens.

It's very measurable, which I've had the same experience appealing, not with weightlifting though, with biking. That's really cool. Uh, biking and with model airplanes, they're like model airplanes. It's like you, you kind of have to, you move up to more difficult to fly and more difficult to build, uh, but that they do cooler things, you know? And then with biking, it's like you're, you, the road biking world is obsessed with measurement. So it's like watt meters and, um, uh, cadence and heart rate and speed and, and, uh, uh,

total perceived effort. Not anyway, just so many numbers you can collect on your computer and analyze and crunch them. And then you can try to move one of those numbers up by the way you, uh, by the way you train. Yeah. but anyway yeah so maybe that's i'm trying to think of like a common thread that would help a currently a developer to um find a hobby that might appeal to their developer senses here is the common thread with all my hobbies uh i tried them and liked them i don't i don't know

i don't have a thesis of how i pick hobbies it's just stuff i try and enjoy have there been any any hobbies you've tried and not liked oh stuff i've tried and not liked i tried to get into board games and i just i just can't i don't know like those fancy board games you see at board game shops not not monopoly i think they look pretty and i enjoy the idea of them and especially the idea of having a group of friends that you play board games with but i just tried a few times and was like this is boring i don't know okay um which is funny because that's very similar to dnd and that's true and many engineers like playing board games yeah they love them which is great they're just not that's because they're good they're good engineers they're just not my

they're just better than me uh i don't know i feel like i'm at the i'm i'm old enough that i'm starting to stagnate in life so i don't try a bunch of stuff as much and yeah because you've already sampled out all the things that you don't like so yeah my time is so full like i gotta kick out stuff to try new things and that's scary so that reminds me there's a new hobby that i have as of the last two or three years which is traveling to crazy new places that i've never been like what do you mean you just like roll the dice and then buy a plane ticket or no yeah i roll the dice find a conference that i can speak at and we'll pay for my travel and then go um i love it i love visiting new places uh i love being a tourist and like checking

out uh historical stuff nature stuff and just you know visiting new places whether by road or by airplane um that can be really really fun huh which i also do with people never alone so how how can this be helpful for a question asker i feel like we're just kind of rambling about our lives which is fascinating to me me talking about myself i i could keep going for a long time but how does this help anyone else i think the answer is it helps just as much as any of our shows help okay how did i find my hobbies i don't know some of them are things that i did when i was younger so just my friends started doing them dnd was uh i've like bounced off it a couple times like i played non-dnd but some other

role-playing game with a friend years ago and then i really loved it but it was like i could never do that that was the last bastion of nerdiness in my head like i buy comic books i am i am comfortable with the idea of being nerdy but dungeons and dragons was a step too far for some crosses the line yeah the the bro in my head was like nerd uh but then i started i listened to some podcasts about it i don't know i just kind of like approached it asymptotically over time always reaching for it but never quite achieving yeah and then you cross the line yeah i think i think that is a hobby that's an example of a thing that i'm comfortable enough as a person now to be like i don't i don't know this sounds cool and i'm gonna do i don't care if it looks

nerdy um so i probably wouldn't have done it at 25 for example because i would have been too worried about appearing nerdy all right maybe people should tweet in with their hobbies that they uh enjoy as developers what they like to do that's not a computer related i i remembered my point dave oh dungeons and dragons i just decided one day you know what we're gonna do this and then i asked people in the utah js community just a local group that i hang out with a lot who wants to come play and uh the people that came were a mixture of acquaintances friends and people i had never met before and it's it was cool to have a group that i could just ask like that um that feels like the core of a way to find hobbies with other people is if you hang out in groups at all

for technical things those people all do things besides programs so you could kind of see what they do and i don't know just ask them like what are you doing this weekend or what do people like to do for fun and you'll get some ideas and you might be able to approach things that you could join other people in doing that way i i awesome i do think um i've tried to avoid generalizing or or forcing recommendations on other people i think one generalization i would make is some kind of physical activity in some form that makes you happy is pretty much good for everybody i think like yeah you kind of get two birds with one stone on that one yeah yeah it's it's nice is using your body when your job revolves around your mind that's that's what i really enjoy is

i just sit in a chair and think all day and i'm just a brain with fingers for so much of my day and when i go to the gym i i have to like turn that brain off and then i'm like a calf or a thigh i don't know i'm just like all these body parts together it's it's so different from what i do all day and i think it adds richness to my life so let me ask you this when you're working out are you able to make insights uh like you do when you're in the showers for example about programming sometimes yeah yeah that never happens to me when i'm when i'm exercising really like my my like higher reasoning skills just completely shut down i can barely do arithmetic huh you know like it will take me minutes i'll be like okay i'm traveling at 18 miles an hour

i have two miles left how long till i get home and i'll get home before i solve the problem it's a way to make the time pass faster so when uh when i work out i usually have periods of of multiple minutes between sets when i'm resting uh-huh um so in that time sometimes i'll be listening to a podcast uh i actually read books at the gym sometimes and i look like a giant weirdo because i'm like at the squat rack with a book in my hand with a dungeon master's guide yeah i haven't pulled that out yet but i will i dare you i dare you yeah um and then i just find the largest man there and go up to him and stare him down with the dungeon master's guide in my hand what but yeah but but sometimes i'll just like take notes on

my phone about problems i've been thinking about um that that period of like physical activity and then there's this kind of cool down in between sometimes i'm too wiped out to think much if i'm If I'm going hard in the paint, but this built-in cycle of if I'm going hard in the paint. Can you explain that metaphor? It's from basketball. That's all I know. Oh, it's a basketball metaphor. I know that one.

Yeah, I hate basketball. I know I'm garbage at it. The paint refers to the painted area under the basket that's commonly referred to as the key, right? Yeah, I think that's not the key. i think the key is that half circle but i'm well out of my depth here no no no no it's the whole thing uh up to the foul line it's the rectangle is it yeah because you can only spend three seconds in the key if you're on offense before you get a foul i believe and they call and they say three seconds in the paint as also you are right look jameson i literally tried out for the school

basketball team twice i literally was forced by my childhood friends to play 21 so they could win every game that's my basketball cred okay okay have we helped this person i think what we have done is we have demonstrated that we are two of the most boring developers you will ever oh my gosh i just can't believe it's been so long talking about my own hobbies yeah is there anything i loved it i personally i enjoyed listening to your hobbies okay good i i feel like i understand you better that that that insight that you just are constantly seeking solitude just really helps me understand you yeah good and we're so different in that way yeah like i hate i like being alone and reading a book occasionally but for my hobbies i i don't know why i just have to be

with someone like do you go to movie theaters alone oh no no okay okay you haven't crossed that line no i don't eat i don't like go to a restaurant by myself would you go to an amusement park by yourself no no that sounds okay horrible yeah okay okay so you are human mostly human do you have i would like one roller coaster ticket please i can't think of a worse phrase the chair next to you is empty all right well i guess that question has been sort of pretty much answered from our own feeble experience we have hobbies i think i think they make me a better developer

and since i want that to be true i assume that that is true of your hobbies day absolutely okay it's absolutely the only reason i have hobbies is so i can be a better developer with more passion yeah life is optimized to be i work hard i play hard so that i can work hard you let your kids know that you had kids so that you could be a better developer that's right listen son all i see is lines of code i know i'm reading you a story about a bunny but really it's all about the tortoise and hare algorithm for finding cycles in a linked list this is to teach me patience so that i

will be a better team member at work yeah i'm in deep oh that is the saddest thing all right question has been answered good luck answered james and where can people go if they want us to answer their questions they can go to softskills.audio that is our website and there's a link prominently displayed on the website to a google form you can fill out the form with as much or as little details you would like about your question too much i think that the questions have gotten uh short enough to read for a while we are getting um multiple paragraphs and that can be hard to skim through because we don't prepare enough we usually pull open the questions look at them for a few minutes before the show and pick the pick questions so things that we

can digest in that amount of time are more likely to get read things with things with emojis tend to get our attention if dear jameson and dave fire fire 100 100 explosion car should i quit my job like yeah it sounds like you need to talk to your manager i think that's the answer um yeah send us your questions we love reading them we learn from reading them and we love answering them yep thanks very much all right we will catch you next week the end