don't let coding ruin your life (why 80% of programmers are NOT happy)

Many people talk about how nice is to be a software engineer, like you make good money and you have these offices with free food and a day in the life of a of a software engineer. What they don't talk about, it's about the ugly side of things. And so today together with Bogdan, uh, we want to talk about the actual reality of the job, not the frapuccino, not the hipster glasses, not the New York City lifestyle, but the actual real life stuff that the developers have to deal with on a daily base that nobody wants to talk about.

If you don't know us, my name is Dece, this is Bogdan, is my brother and co-founder together at a senior dev. So Bogdan, what's the first harsh reality developers have to deal with? So number one, without any further ado, it's competition anxiety. What does competition anxiety mean? Well, the number one thing that happens when you are a developer is that you see all this, you see the boot camps, you see a lot of people can getting into the field, and it very much feels like there is someone um pretty much everywhere with remote work going for your job.

So you live with this constant fear of, you know, am I going is to still be relevant in two years? Are they going to hire someone with a lower salary? Uh because again, there's all the boot camps are pushing people, there's all this online course movement and as the CS graduates plus the people that are already in the field. And so it feels like you're constantly competing against everybody else uh because again, in in the industry everything moves so fast, so you are always feeling that there is someone that will, you know, will take your job.

Yes, Bogdan, there's a lot of competition anxiety and I talk to developers on a daily basis on the phone, on calls, and what I see it's that layoffs like the recent layoffs that happen in 2022, 2023, so 24. We're moving into 2025 and companies are still laying off software engineers, then there was uh AI coming in and putting more anxiety, more pressure on developers like, hey, we will, you know, automate your job all together.

And I think a lot of people are kind of trying to a lot of developers are trying to suck it up, but there is this so much downward, there's so much pressure on the average developer. Like, basically, if you are out of a job, you know, and you go to find under theplicants, right? And that's kind of the kind of reality that people have to deal with. The Google jobs, the Netflix jobs, all those fancy jobs, the reality is they are hyper competitive.

I think Google was hiring like 0.0.2% or something like that of everybody that applied. I think it was easier to get into Howard University than to get into Google. Many times, as a software engineer, you feel like there's always someone smarter than you, and you feel like expendable, you feel like, you know, they can get rid of you and find someone better tomorrow, right? And this is also fueled by all these, you know, Udemy courses and boot camps, promising people, you know, you're going to be a developer in in you know, in in eight weeks, we're going to make you a a software engineer that can make 100k.

And this never really stopped. I mean, we thought this is going to stop because of layoffs and everything. Now, this is the same messaging developers see. And I think this is something that you really tell with I remember back in my developer days, I had a lot of, you know, competition anxiety. You go to meetups and you don't talk to people, not because you're an introvert, but because you are you think you are, you know, everybody's so much better than you.

And, you know, just by talking with them, that that reality, you know, you're going to have a conversation with them, they are no so much more than you, and, you know, you're going to have to suck it up. And the problem with competition anxiety is that it also fact your your confidence and job security because if you don't have job security because you feel like someone else, you know, there's so many people that are so good, maybe you don't find something in three years.

Um, especially as an adult, you might get commitments, you might have a family, you might have a mortgage, and it's extremely hard for people to just relax. Because they feel like, um, they have no safety or they cannot provide that safety for themselves first and maybe for others because it's always like, am I going to have a job? Am I going to be good enough to be hirable two years from now, five years from now?

Which is not a long time, we got into this to build a long life career. You know, maybe you want to be into this 40 years, and this is your life code, this is, uh, you know, the way you pay your bills. And I think that's that's such a fear that you you wake up to every day. Um, and now that we are here, some tips to to deal with competition anxiety. It's number one to understand this comes from a kind of a scarcity mindset where you think, wow, there are like these little number of jobs and everybody's going for them and everybody's smarter than me.

And it also comes from social media. Right, the way again, you see all these people talking about the stuff they know. You see maybe you some of your friends getting promoted. You feel like you're falling behind. You have fun and it's all an illusion. You have to look at all the good things you do on a daily basis. You have to look at the value you add, and you have to understand it doesn't really matter.

There are plenty of good companies out there, right? And there are plenty of jobs. And as long as you are able to deliver value, as long as you are able with your coding skills to get something from requirement to production, right, as long as that's the truth, right? Then this is what we advise people, when you feel like you're in a storm, when you feel like you're you're feeling very anxious, you think nothing works.

Remember, if you're able to write code, if you're able to solve problems, you will always have a job in any economy, in any world. AI, it's, you know, it's not going to solve that. AI, it's more of an assistant, but it cannot lead, right, the problem solving process. So, just remember, as long as you can solve problems with code, you will have a job and forgettable this competition anxiety, because it's all in your mind.

Yes, and remember, try try to do anything today where you don't stack in the software system. Like, try to, I don't know, buy something, try to talk to your friends, everything runs with software. So trust me, you will never run out of work and the better you are at it, the more value you let, huh? Try to do this is something I used to call myself. Just try to do anything that without touching a piece of software.

Like you go into your car, there's software. You go to, I don't know, McDonald's to get a burger, there's software. To get some cash, there's software. There's software everywhere, yeah. You want to cross the street and the traffic like runs on software. Exactly, on to point number two. Number two, it's taken for granted. And I think you can talk a lot about this because I mean, you've been taken for granted more than once.

But I think what we refer with this is that as a software engineer, you know, you work very hard and you can put hours, hours and hours and weekends into something to just see it, you know, thrown away without any any feelings. And it's not that you feel expendable, like they can get rid of you is that your work, it's also expendable. And and if there are problems, you know, the developer is going to solve it, don't worry, the IT, you know, the IT guys are going to nice and girls, whatever. I got to figure it out, right? Um, so there's this general feeling and I remember for my writing for my writing code, um, um, writing code, yes, like there is little empathy. There is little empathy for the developer, right? Developers paid the price for the sales, for the management teams over promising, right? And we are kind of, you know, all the work ends up on your on your desk. And when everything goes well, you know, they close the deal because the sales people, right? We we get little visibility for all the stuff that kind of enable the deal. Uh can you, you know, where what can you say about being taken for granted? Well, I mean, exactly what you said, so I used to work uh in this company where uh we were building software for for small businesses. And every time they'd close a big deal, you know, there would be a parade of the sales people all telling how they did the deal. Uh, but to be honest, you know, as a developer, you'll grind out code, you'll put out amazing features and the moment you finish the feature, they'd come on and ask for work or even worse, you had bugs in it. So you'd feel like you're just a tread milling, your work is not really visible. And you know, the sales people or even product would make such a big deal about this till they closed and how, you know, how they did this and ABC and how they had bonuses. As a developer, you'd sometimes pull all nighters and you wake up next day to more work and there would be incidents and you'd ask for features that are so exciting. And when they build these features, it wouldn't be because, you know, your you crunch your neurons to it's really cool this thing to you. It would be because the, you know, sales or product had this crazy idea and that's what actually broke it and they actually worked to make that crazy idea reality, all the mini problems you had to solve, the thousands of things you had to to deal with to just make it visible. Um, they would ignore it and be like, oh yeah, now it's on the screen and now we can do ABC with it. Um, and it'll just put you more work. So, um, it would be extremely hard and, you know, I remember like they would close a big sale, they'll give bonuses to sales people. I would have to, you know, write down everything I did and make my work visible and sit down with my manager, explain why I want the 500 box. Yeah, and there's also the the visionary founder idea where especially in startups, there is the founder or co founder who had the vision and kind of all the merit goes to them.

that the ones. It's easy, but, but then there's a a team of hundreds of people that made everything possible. And one thing I want to talk about here is about the invisible work, right? The work, the problems that you prevented. Because people see the problems you solve as software engineers, but they don't see like you mentioned all the micro decisions and all the little problems that you avoided happening. Right? And this is something that we need to live and we need to to to suck it up. Which is why we advise everybody and specifically like the students we work with, but every developer to really ask for the money, don't be afraid to ask to be paid, because after, you know, that's the most magic you're going to get. I mean, you might get some some applause in a demo or, you know, when you're going to present your stuff, but you're not going to get a lot beyond that. And this is why you have to make sure that you get paid fairly and that you get paid well for the job you're making. Because there are no bonuses for a developer. There are no end of quarter performance bonus like sales people have. Exactly. You you solve a lot of problems that are not even visible. You solve a lot of problems that you can't explain. And a lot of times you don't get work, you don't get paid for problems you avoid. So if you design a system in a better way, um, maybe you know that, maybe your maybe your immediate, like your your manager, your boss might understand that, sometimes they don't even understand it. Um, so you need to put a lot of work into making that visible, because if you don't, nobody knows about it. It's again, it's very easy to show as a sales person that I closed, you know, these five people this week, but it's extremely hard as a developer to show why I've been working on accessibility or security or scalability for the last, um, the last five days, or why I've been moving or removing technical debt, so we can actually extend the system he wants from now. Like first of all, they didn't, most people didn't even think like that, they don't even understand why you're doing this, um, and, you know, maybe someone takes that piece of code and they add a new feature to it, and they did so fast because you left it in a very good state. So there's so much invisible, there's so much unknown, and that's why you need to make an extra effort to show what you're doing, to show your value, and get paid. This is one of the things that we work a lot with with our MTs, especially in their CVs, but not only that, in the interviews that they're making, it's to

an extra effort in quantifying and showing the impact of the work you've done. And I know a lot of people talk about this, but in the end, this is not about, you know, the the number of features you ship, but this is a mindset. Like understand that especially if you want to get to senior dev, it's not only about what you do and what you know, but it's about who knows about what you do and what you know. Like it's 50% doing the job, 50% selling it. And if you ignore the selling part, because I know we tend to ignore it as software engineers, we're very analytic analytical and we like to look at the face values like, hey, what is this? You know, don't don't come to me with with sales, but you cannot ignore, you cannot ignore that you you are operating in a in a political organization. Any company, it's a political group, right? And part of that, it's the impression that people have about you now. I'm not saying you should become a political animal, that's not what we indicate, like we do exactly the opposite of the senior death. We teach people how to improve their technical skills for us, but you need to be both a sales person, a politician, and a producer. 50-50. You need both. If not, you're going to be the talented person that has a desk in a corner and nobody knows about. They work a lot, nobody gets no merit, you know, works hard, but gets little out of it. Yes, so I remember what happens, it's because you're taking for granted, you also your your the quality of the work will decrease. You see all these people getting married, get demotivated. Um, you're putting a lot of hours and you're churning out code, this feels like it's never ended. And you will also, if you don't take care of this really soon, you will end up losing passion for what you do, you'll end up doing less, you'll end up just like shipping stuff out there, just not caring about it. And, uh, your work will get worse. So you got to be very careful, you got to solve this very early on, because if you don't get paid for the work you're doing, or if you don't get the merit, like the the uh people, you know, turning, hey, you've done a good job, that's very important. You will stop doing your best. You need this to keep going. You need this to to keep being passionate about what you're doing, you need to feel like, hey, I'm getting paid for it. Stop being mediocre. Then you're kind of disconnect and you kind of half fast your job. And this is why I think one of the quickest fix, just like competition anxiety for software engineers who, you know, you want to stop being, you know, taken for granted, is to really advocate for

your stuff and you tell to yourself, you know what, I'm weighted and I know what I'm waiting. Like it's it's enough. This is enough. I'm going to ask for what I think I deserve, I'm going to ask for the money and if this company doesn't give it to me, you know, there will be other companies. And you need to have this mindset at all times, because if not, this this the problem with this competition site, you take them for granted, other stuff that we can talk about, is that it messes up your mind and it messes up your confidence.

And without confidence, you cannot get anything done. This is a job where it's imperative that you believe, think you can do it, you feel useful. So you can give your best, okay? Number three, the sprint mid grinder. What What does that mean? So, I guess the best example is to to go again back to one of my first jobs where I used to be working mostly on the front end. And I had another five people, uh no, three people in my team, they're all front end developers, and you find yourself in every sprint competing for who's going to deliver the most tickets.

And you see people around you maybe delivering uh free tickets. And maybe you delivered one, or maybe you couldn't even close a single ticket at that sprint, because it was something more complex, and you feel this this pressure of, okay, there's this sprint, I need I need to deliver tickets. And you take the tickets and I hope it's a ticket I can deliver on. And then you are a manager, maybe your your your boss didn't directly compare you with your your your peers, but you do feel that pressure of, okay, what is this person they close three tickets at sprint and five the sprint before and I just did two and you feel like you're just on a on a treadmill.

You're just running, uh you know, and spinning your your dices so that hopefully in the next sprint you deliver, uh you you get the ticket you can deliver on and and then you mentally always compare yourself with um all the other people in your age. So it becomes this whole agile that sounds very idealistic and very cool. It's actually becomes sort of a of a prison of a kind. Yeah, and I can recall actually in the last uh a few weeks, two developers that uh that we were we were coaching.

One of them, and this is a real situation, went on a on a longer holiday, I think it was a three weeks paid time off or holiday, paid holiday. When they came back, they had like a disciplinary meeting with their manager, who was comparing literally the the the number of tickets they were delivering. They weren't looking at the scope, the context what was delivered. both, you know, these place and they three tickets and you did one and you're going to get in trouble. And this was a very this was a respectable company.

It was some kind of startup where you say, hey, you know, maybe they're not so professional, they don't understand how things go, right? So, this is a reality and another developer who, you know, spent um spent a few weeks with one ticket because she was just getting onboarded on staff. And then she, you know, she saw like people uh you know, the manager and are talking to her that much and how is that ticket going, what have you been doing? And I think this is the same as competition anxiety, but inside the company.

And what what would you say? What are some ways to kind of get out of this uh sprint mid-grinder and this this anxiety, this this pressure to deliver tickets and to be compared. Based on like the tickets you delivered and constantly feel like, you know, you have something bad on your back, someone on your back, watching on. how much stuff you're delivering and every day at work it's just this this um race against time.

You know, the thing is you do not choose the culture of the company you work for or the team you work for. And if you're a manager or you know, the people around you have this it's a very competitive uh environment, not a collaborative one. And people start looking at how many tickets you delivered, then you you have no choice but to to play the game. Like now, what I want you to do is do not obsess about the number of tickets you're delivering.

But do keep an eye on the scoreboard. Okay? So, if you for example, if there is like the people around you, they're doing six seven tickets, and you're stuck in one big ticket, then try to get other small tasks so you can actually, you know, compensate for that. Okay? So, you need, and this goes back to being taken for granted, competition anxiety. Like, you need to be aware of the game that's being played and you need to play a little.

We don't advise you to be overly political, as always, but we do advise you to keep an eye on the environment around you. Keep an eye on, okay, this is, you know, second week of the sprint, what have I delivered, the demos coming in two days, I need something to show for it. And if I cannot show this ticket, maybe I can pick something small that I can add to my um uh to my um to my to-do list that I can talk about and kind of compensate, okay?

On to number four, the general gatekeeping. This is very interesting, and what we mean by gatekeeping is there is always, I mean, everybody in software, every developer says, I yeah, we we are very collaborative, we like to help each other, we win as a team. But in the end, a lot of people use um information hiding, like, you know, there's a developer who built a certain system, there is no documentation, and that's a way for them to hoard power. Okay, now we know, we know this is not a good career strategy, like hoarding information, because when you when you are vital to a certain system, you cannot be promoted, right? So, you might feel safe because nobody knows about this and I need to fix it, but in the long term, you will always be stuck there and they will promote someone else, right? But this will happen, this is a reality. But when we say gatekeeping, it's not gatekeeping. gatekeeping only from other developers who don't want to onboard you or there's no documentation and they don't want to sit down with you and have a programming, because they feel like they're going to lose certain power. That's one thing. But also, you know, sales people who might be hiding information, product managers who might be hiding information, right? So, there's a general gatekeeping that will you will feel like there's certain information that's being kind of hidden from you certain times. Uh, how can we deal with that? Yeah, so as you mentioned, people use gatekeeping to become more replaceable. So back from design, we have this competence anxiety and people are insecure of their position and they're like, well, if I get if I build the system and nobody knows how to fix it only me, then they will call me, you know, then I I'll become replaceable. There's some career advice I think that goes into designs, right? Make yourself replaceable. But that's again, scarcity mindset applied to your career and that will make you feel, uh, poorer, it will make you feel weightless in a way. Even if you do it, because you'll feel like hey, the moment they know this, I'm out, right? They will eventually figure it out anyway. And so, the best way is to think of, hey, we're here to solve crap and if the people around me are going to get good at solving the problem I'm solving, that's good. I can offload that to them if they really want to do it and I can jump on the next, I can spend more time with product, I can think of new things we can add or better ways to do something. You'll never run out of problems to solve. Like, literally, if we would run out of problems to solve, we'd be on the moon and we solve cancer and everything it's, you know, we're living in paradise. That's not the case. Like, look at the world, there's so many things that are broke and you got to apply that

Hey, there's always going to be more work and I'm here to, if I help the people around me solve these problems, I can focus on other and it's an infinite number of problems. You need to solve an infinite numbers of ways you can add value. So you need to go from scarcity to abundance. And once you are there, you'll realize, hey, I just want to get better. Like get out get out of the craft and better as it. Of course, we are individuals. We do compete to some level with everybody else in the sector, but somebody mature understands that uh uh in the economy, it's all about adding more value. And they take other way with with we do things and what we know, and they always think about the future. Well, let's get better then just, you know, teach people how to solve ABC so then I can focus on D, or find out what D is, because maybe we don't know yet, but we can spend time thinking about. So in terms of gate keeping, like if you feel like someone it's gate keeping information from you, it's it can be it has something to do with you that you may make them feel a bit threatened that you are kind of they see you as a threat, they see you as someone that can replay them, they don't want to share that information with you. Or it can be that they do this with with everybody and they see that this is their system, maybe they have been wronged by the company at some point in time and it close themselves up. So, sometimes you can do something about it, sometimes you can not do something about it. And this is why this video is called, reality is that you have to live with in a way every day. Even if you try your best thing, these things won't go away completely. Some things you just got to live with. One very effective way to design and prevent. gatekeeping in general is to build the relationship with that person, to make them trust, to build that trust a bit where they actually going to be willing to to share, they don't see you as a competitor. They see that you can work together and they are willing to give away, to give a bit away, other parts will come from your manager and the culture of the company. That has to be aware of the bass factor, right? And you can, you can influence that. You can say, hey, you can actually, you can actually in meetings, in team meetings, say, how can we make sure there's no bass factor here? And that's when your manager and other people will start being aware, and that's again, there will be a team effort to limit, right, information hoarding by certain individuals. And going back to how do you build a relationship, because people talk about building a relationship, in the end, what what a relationship is in the end, it's certain trust. I trust you.

guys me how do you generate request by having repeated interactions in a consistent way where both both parties win, right? That can be just a chat, it can be going for a coffee, it can be having a little pair programming session. And again, this is not easy because nobody has time and that's why you will have to be proactive. So you'll have to see certain individuals, look around who has the power here, who knows about microservices A, who knows who's making the architecture decisions.

And you need to start building a relationship with those people by trying to interact with them, trying to have win-win exchanges with them as soon as possible and as often as possible. And if someone helps you, you got to recognize that made it public. Now, don't overdo it, you want to be genuine, if you overdo it, people will smell it. They'll be like, ah, you're just, you know, you're just, uh, sugarcoating everything and being too politically correct.

You don't want to be that person because that will actually decrease trust. They'll be like, oh, you're doing it to to show something. But when someone helps you, if someone helps you, debug something in the deployment pipeline. Mention it in the standup, give credit where it's due and people will see that and they will see that you're not taking away their work, you're actually making it visible.

So, they will at some conscious level will want to help you again. So, number five, it's framework slavery. I think this is pretty straightforward and it's something at the senior dev we talk about, but it's this constant pressure of not knowing enough of new frameworks, new libraries, new stuff being released. It used to be new JavaScript frameworks, now it's like AI coding tools or it's whatever AI is going to automate next.

And I think that that generates a lot of anxiety and a lot of pressure that, you know, you feel many times as a software engineer, you feel like no matter how much you learn, no matter how much you do, it will never be enough. And again, I think this is because of several reasons. Number one is the false impression that you need to know everything and that you are paid for what you know, not for what you can learn, okay?

And I think you are paid for both, you are paid in part for the things you know, but you're also paid based on your ability to solve problems when they come to you, right? Number two, it's again, social media. feel like you have a bit of, you know, people missing out and shiny object syndrome and you feel like slave to these framework, learning new things, then maybe you should limit the people you see and you should limit the the number of newsletters you you read. And I and I do this. I really try to limit the amount of information I'm taking because they should just too much. There's just too much exposure and actually, a lot of that stuff is just noise.

And I think point number three, it's focused not on frameworks, but on principles. Right? And when you focus on principles, you know that a lot of frameworks are kind of trying to reinvent the wheel, and you can actually see commonalities, you know, from the new stuff coming in, which is just combination of the old stuff. And you have this school of mental models, right? And this is what we try to teach actually with Bogdan and other senior dev. We try to teach people fundamentals and mental models that go beyond frameworks.

And I think that's the only way, only sustainable way for you to stay relevant, to move towards senior principle and beyond as a software engineer. Bogdan, anything you like to add? Just to go back to a real-life example. I remember, um, a couple of years ago, I was interviewing for, I think it was a front end position, it was React and, you know, two of the five interviews, actually five interview questions, two of them were, what was the, I think it was React 18 and what are the new features in the release?

And then I looked them up after the interview, tells me 70% of them are useless. Like you're never going to use that. They're just like, oh, we fixed the search case or we added, you know, use optimistic, whatever. Like, who's going to use that or if they do use it, it's some underlying framework level that you never interact. So they asked me, that was one question. And the other one was, can you tell me exactly how, and I remember this one really well, Redux thunk works, like the sagas design of Redux. I'm like, how is that even relevant to the position?

Like, unless you really worked with it yesterday, you might not recall it. I can explain them my understanding of it with the mental models like, hey, you know, it's probably some asynchronous actions and there's like some reducers how it works. And the person was surprised that I actually explained it well without I didn't work with Saga, but I kind of knew how it it would work. But I'm like, what who who asked that, right? So you will feel that.

You will feel that framework sleep. It happens every day. Yeah, and I think a good point you made there. It's, you know, don't don't care. Like, you know, it's going to happen, people are going to ask you stuff, that's on the news, because that's what people do. You don't have to answer, if you can answer, because you know some principles like you mentioned, that's awesome. If not, hey, you know, they will still hire you even if you don't know the shiny later stuff, because any people who can get things done, right?

Um awesome, on to point number five, the bonus, what's the last one? Let's see. No mentorship. Yeah, this is a bit of a Easter egg from because that's what we provide at the senior dev, we help developers like you through mentorship, we help them fill up, dating the gaps, first understand what the remaining gaps are, fill them up, put in place a pan with a clear path for them to move forward and have the mentorship they need.

Because the truth is, as a software engineer, you will receive little to no mentorship. Companies say that, they like to say, hey, we mentor you, we're going to give you this and that. Then you sign up, there's a lot of work to do. Everybody is busy, the senior is busy. Sometimes there's no senior in your team. Many times that senior person it's overworked or they don't know how to mentor, they haven't learned, maybe they are a great developer, but not a great teacher.

So the reality of it is that you're going to spend a lot of time getting, you're going to spend a lot of time alone on the internet, searching Discord, watching Discord. And those things are good, but nothing replaces having a good an experienced senior dev guiding you throughout the way, right? And ChatGPT won't replace that, because AI by nature and computers by nature are reactive. ChatGPT can be your assistant, but not your guide, and what people need in education and what developers actually need to make that transition towards a senior level faster.

It's a guide, a mentor. And there's not going to be a lot of that, which is the reason why are here. So, if you're interested in actually mentoring you and helping you reach your full potential as a software engineer, then check out the website, check out how we can help you, check out the think assessment in the comments. And if we find a fit, we would more than love to get you in through our community and help you move to the next level.

Anything you like to add? Yeah, I mean coming back to uh one of my my latest positions, I I was a principal engineer, I remember and people would come to me, especially sales would come to me with with so much stuff. They're just throwing us everything. Oh, this bottom broke. Oh, we need to implement this. And now, so going out and I remember one of the very seniors, uh, he was already at the VP level, but still hands on.

Like I've never seen a VP in software writing code every day. You don't see those people. That's someone that's really passionate. They've been doing it for 30 years and they write code for public. And, you know, they just sit me down, they saw like, what what's going? And and I would be like I he's like you you used to right he'd come to you, right, and that throwing all this stuff at you. Like he knew exactly what I was going through.

I'm like, yes, I can't I can't even pick it anymore. Look look at my backlog and it's all it's all, you know, it's all like little kids just throwing stuff at me. Uh, sales people telling me, oh, we should have like blockchain in the application, we can even deploy it well. And he told me, look, look, look, look, look, most of this stuff will never be done. Okay? Now, you don't want to tell them no, cuz you're going to be the grumpy developer.

Just tell them, yes, let's put in the backlog. Um and that was uh that was amazing. We talked for 5 minutes and it solved like it it made better my last three weeks. Um I I would have never imagined that there's been a solution for that kind of thing. I thought yeah, this is it, you know, just going to put up with it. He told me, look, they are very, you know, those people they get very excited in those meetings, you go in, you smile, you agree without committing and uh and let them come to you again in the background if it never gets done.

If it wasn't important and if it's important, we probably get it done because that's how it works. He's been around for 30 years, he knew that that's what's going to happen. And that's that's a powerful mentor because a lot of knowledge, it's not written, it's not on the internet, it's not on videos. I mean, we try to put as much stuff as out there, but there is a lot of of um knowledge that's specific to a situation.

Coming from someone who I think I'd spent a few I've spent thousands of dollars on, you know, conferences, courses, nothing helped me more than a mentor. Okay? And I I I tried it all, hackathons, any kind of stuff. With that being said, we hope you like this video, we just want to say we've been there. We know these harsh realities, but if you are if you put your best foot forward, you're going to make it out on the back side, this is still an amazing job.

We've been doing this for 11 years, and we still love it, if you like this video, let us know in the comments and we will see you folks in the next one.