Productivity Q&A and Videos

Hi,

I often hear from here that you should strive to land code as fast as possible to make a meaningful impact and get feedback from your users. I follow this mantra pretty closely as I see those story points as free baskets that make my team look good (because objectively, we're getting stuff done), but it seems many engineers don't subscribe to this philosophy. Sometimes, I see PRs that have been QA'd and approved linger around for days to weeks... It feels like a problem, but it also feels like I'm the only one who brings it up. What is the best course of action?

Hi Taro Community,

I'm wrestling with a question about work hours that perhaps many of you have also encountered. Is it generally advisable to stick strictly to an 8-hour workday, or is it acceptable to work more when necessary? Specifically, if the tasks at hand don't get completed within the standard 8-hour window, should I extend my hours into the night to resolve issues?

Here's my dilemma: I've found myself working additional hours at night to tackle pending tasks. While this has helped me keep up with my workload, I'm unsure about the implications of this practice:

• Should I expect acknowledgment or appreciation from my manager for these extra efforts?
• Is it beneficial to communicate my extended hours to my manager, and could it potentially influence decisions regarding bonuses or other forms of recognition?
• How do managers typically view overtime work, and what is the balance between demonstrating dedication and setting healthy work boundaries?

I'd appreciate any guidance or personal experiences you can share on handling overtime work and how to approach discussions about it with management.

Thank you for your insights.

We use JIRA for writing up tasks, which the respective engineers always make, but there is no sprint. So, we need more sprint retrospection.
All communications are done very vaguely via a Slack message, sometimes a word with little but no context or a screenshot.
I want you to know that I'm concerned about communicating this request for proper planning with my manager.

I'm an E5 mobile engineer at a Big Tech company. Due to lots of manager attrition, I currently report to a hands-off Director with too many reports to have regular 1:1s. I found an awesome EM who agreed to let me join his team and promised me E6-scope projects on his team. My Director is his skip-level, so I'm staying in the same org.

However, before I could make the official team switch, my TPM loaned me to another team lacking mobile resources to meet the TPM's own OKR. He did not bother talking to the awesome EM or me beforehand. My scope on the TPM's project is E5 at most. Now that project is dragging on. It's already code complete, but they want to keep me on that project until it's fully rolled out. We're waiting for mobile adoption to reach a certain threshold before we can do a force upgrade. Due to the code chill around the upcoming holidays, we likely can't do the force upgrade until next year. In the meantime, the project's EM is asking me to investigate pre-existing bugs in their feature. The awesome EM met with the TPM and that project's EM to fast-track my transfer, explaining that he needs me for Q1 planning & our team's own OKRs, but the latter two insisted that I need to support their project until it's completely done, which includes the force upgrade. Am I stuck on this project until January next year or is there a way to switch teams more quickly?

I ran into this issue a few times so far:

1. I need to solve a problem.
2. 2 senior people (could be engineers or managers) tell me to use different solutions.
3. They do not talk to each other directly.

I'm the middleman, bouncing back and forth between solutions. Getting blocked at the PR level (sometimes before that too) by either stake holders.

It's demotivating, I do not get things done quick.

What should I do?

I wanted to share an update and seek advice following my first 1:1 with my manager. Based on one of Alex's earlier suggestions, I inquired about how many commits I should aim to have landed after my first month to gauge my ramp-up progress. My manager mentioned that he doesn't track commit counts as a metric.

Given this, I'm curious about how I should approach setting tangible goals or milestones for my initial period at the company. Without commit counts as a metric, what would be a good way to measure my progress and contributions during the ramp-up phase?

I'd greatly appreciate your insights on this.

Following up on my previous message, I've been pondering whether my manager's response regarding not tracking commit counts might be influenced by my recent joining of the team. Is it common for managers to initially downplay the importance of specific metrics like commit counts for new team members, perhaps to alleviate early pressure or for other reasons?

I'm going through In the lesson on , Alex talks about the value of long uninterrupted periods. Notably, he says that a focus block should be minimum 4 hours.

This got me thinking, what do these 4 hours (or longer) look like? Is it 4 hours sitting down uninterrupted at your desk? Is it 4 hours broken up by getting up every 30-60 minutes to grab a snack or chat with a colleague at the office? Do short walks outside () fit in them?

I'm not trying to be annoying or nerd-snipe, I just want to know what the nitty-gritty behaviour of the world's most productive software engineers looks like :)

For me, I feel like I have a mild case of ADD, so if I score a victory, minor or major, in my code, I get up and do a quick meditation, use the washroom, and/or stretch after ~30 minutes, but my hunch is more productive people sit uninterrupted for longer.

Hi everyone, I work on Android and currently my team isn't having a lot of OKR work, at least Android-specific. This means I got some time to understand the system better and improve my craftsmanship.

What could I pick up now which will help me in career growth and better understanding of the system? As of now, I am writing a couple of lint rules. I also tried exploring few other repos but there are just too many to explore in-depth.

Fixed a tricky bug, got promoted, or landed an interview? Let us know in the comments below!

Stuck in code review hell, got ghosted by recruiters, or rejected for promo? We want to hear about that too!

Recently I had asked a friend who works in DevX analytics (developer experience analytics) about her work and she mentioned that currently there was no other way to measure developer productivity other than lines of code or how frequent, often, and long someone was coding. Isn’t this a bad measure for productivity? Couldn’t someone just be pushing crap code (copy and paste) that has no substantive value to the team? I also thought about this article by the CTO of Carta that also talks about alignment and other ways to understand substantive and more qualitative measures than quantitative factors to evaluate success and I guess productivity?

How does your company evaluate developer productivity and success and metrics? I’ve found talking to former Meta engineers a lot they tend to have some really specific ways to measure success metrics that seem reasonable.

When I joined my current company, it was a standard 40 hour/week company. Since the end of last year, we’ve been told that we’re all expected to work 55-60 hours/week to get our startup to a successful state (get funding, retain current customers, attract new ones). I’m feeling extremely miserable from the change because the schedule doesn’t allow me to do all the other things that are important to me outside of work, such as spending time with family, cooking and working out regularly, and dedicating time to my hobbies. I have subscribed to newsletters for years to keep up with how the javascript and react worlds are changing, but have stopped reading them. I feel like the work hours have made me less curious about keeping up with tech and growing, which is the thing that I used to like most about this career.

We’re asked to track and report our hours working on tickets, and any time we fall short of expectations it comes up in our weekly one on one with our manager. It’s making me want to leave, but the market is tough, I haven’t interviewed in years and never done DSA or system design questions, and it’s hard to start with the schedule I have, because again I’m already sacrificing time with my family for this job and don’t want to sacrifice more. It’s crazy how much the extra 15-20 hours per week is costing me emotionally.

How do I get out of a situation like this? I don’t have enough savings to fall back on, my wife doesn’t work, and my state doesn’t provide Medicaid even to households with no income.

I've read in a number of places that it's great to tackle your most important tasks first thing in your day, spending 2-4 hours of solid work right from the start. However, I've noticed that it's hard for me to do this in large part because I have my morning scrum an hour into my day and currently have to participate in another team's scrum as well. These meetings often combine to ~45 minutes. Therefore, I'm more inclined to do maintenance tasks and low-hanging fruit, as well as other, smaller-leverage activities like browsing Taro.

I'm assuming morning scrums are the norm, so any tips to get high-leverage work done with a scrum smack in the middle of my morning? Now that I think about it, starting earlier would be one solution. Others are welcome.

I'm trying to improve my system of productivity. My system of late has involved running my life from Gmail, which I'm quickly realizing is woefully inadequate. For one, when it makes me reactive - what shows up in my inbox gets my attention. (After writing that sentence, I turned off Gmail notifications on my phone, so this question has already been productive).

A second aspect that makes it inadequate involves how I would not work on things that aren't high priority in a given day. My approach until now has been to snooze the email until a certain point in the future. The natural problem with this is I might snooze the number of days too early so I'll see the thing I should be doing before I should work on it or too late, in which case I'll see it after I should.

I think the solution to this is to use an Agile board for my tasks like I do at work. I'll have a lane for tasks I'm doing, one for "Done" and a backlog.

I've also recently been working on embracing the Just One Thing approach. I've struggled with trying to get too many things done and what invariably happens is I prioritize the easy tasks or tasks I want to do rather than the most important ones. By only having one thing to do in "Doing", I leave myself no wiggle room to procrastinate.

Does this system make sense? Is using Agile for oneself the best approach? I understand different things work for different people, but I'm really interested in a system that orients me towards important work and makes it hard to procrastinate.

The second part of this question involves the backlog of things to do. There are quite a few, some of which I will probably never get to for lack of time. What's a good method for clearing these? I'm thinking everything in the backlog is deleted after existing for X amount of time (e.g. 2 months). If it really is important, I will think to add it back to the backlog again.

Relatedly, I have a ton of bookmarks in Chrome with all sorts of wonderful material, including some from Taro. Again, the problem is between work, side-projects, fitness and life, I don't think I'll ever get to the vast majority of them, because watching and reading is consuming and usually the most important thing I can be doing is producing (coding or writing). I'm thinking of just deleting all these bookmarks because they present a temptation of how I should be spending my time.

An alternative is just to try and keep the most important ones (e.g. right now I have 100 bookmarks, and one can argue I should only ever have 20), but this means I have to go through and try and stack rank them against each other - a task of its own and not an easy one. Deleting them all is a one-time painful option, but actually the easiest one.

Happy to get people's insights!

So, I'm the only frontend developer on a mobile application. My boss is BE and so if I ask for help he just tells me, "im sorry but I have my own things, you need to figure this out". I've expressed concerns when I wasn't happy with that answer; but, he doubled down that I knew more about him than my problem and so couldn't help me.

The issue is, the things I have problems with are exactly specific to frontend, maybe I'm trying to do some data flow stuff and just want to bounce off a coworker. Or, I have to integrate some FE piece to the BE and since we're a 3 person (engineer-wise) startup, we don't have documentation or really anything besides slack messages to explain stuff.

This has led to me being forced to just white knuckle my way through problems. For the past year and a half I've been able to do this; however, I'm now facing more difficult problems, live-streaming, bridging native modules ( I work with RN ).

More recently, I got stuck on a problem where, I seriously contemplated quitting the company because I couldn't figure it out. There is a ton of pressure because we have daily stand up and I can only say, "I'm still working on X due to Y" for so long. And so I thought, what happens when breaking it down, trying to solve a simpler problem, posting online, talking to teammates, reading docs, just doesn't work? I seriously thought everything was spiraling out of control.

I honestly don't know if there is an answer to this problem. But I was truly feeling hopeless just blindly trying to solve an issue by googling, chatgpt, and hoping for the best each time I hit compile.

I've only ever coded in js/ts; however, as I seek to grow my skills in react-native I've been trying to learn swift to deal with bridging. However, after coding a few hours in swift when I swapped back its like my brain stopped working and simple stuff I couldn't remember the syntax. After working in it again it kinda went back to normal; but, is this something that is normal or goes away with practice?

At my company, we work directly with clients. Our project requirements drastically vary from project to project and are highly unstable.

It seems like whenever we finally get a handle on what the requirements are and begin planning/working on the features a new requirement comes in that turns the existing understanding upside down.

It's extremely frustrating to keep having to throw away work when we're told for the umpteenth time that "ok the requirements are locked in", and a week later we're hearing of brand new requirements.

I get that as developers we have to be "agile", but moving the metaphorical goalposts really sucks and 100% slows down progress.

Any tips or advice?

• I'm looking for ideas on how to execute more effectively and robustly as an individual and as a team
• How to keep the team members motivated all the time?

For example: I have been assigned a task that is estimated to be done in 3 days, let's assume it was well estimated.

Because of my skills, I can only finish it in one day.

But if I finish it, the team leader will assign me more tasks.

So my reward for being productive is more work.

So why should I be more productive if I'm just going to have more work to do with no bonus?

Remember, this scenario is as an individual software engineer, not as a company.

What do you think? should I change my mindset? if yes, what are the reasons?

If there is nothing I could do as individual, what do you suggest to handle this with my manager? if they don't want to give bonuses or incentives, should I leave?

I feel like I lack clarity I know I should be taking the time to plan my day but I find myself getting pulled into the working context at any point in time. How do more senior engineers approach this? Are there personal rituals and routines that people use on a daily or weekly basis to move the needle?

It’s been 5 weeks since I’ve started my internship and it’s been pretty overwhelming trying to juggle many responsibilities. I tried balancing school research, my startup and interview prep along with my internship, but I’ve underestimated how much time my internship has been taking.

I’ll start off with the good news first. I’ve been doing well in my internship and my manager is happy with my progress. I managed to implement a pretty critical part of their system that they’ll need in the future. I’ve also set up infrastructure for them to scale their codebase. I need to integrate my work into prod and implement some basic logging.

The bad news is that my internship has been taking much more out of me than I expected. I find myself spending 9-11 hours working daily and as a result, I haven’t been able to do leetcode, research or my startup. As a result here are the consequences:

1. Leetcode: I’ve started applying for full-time jobs and I bombed my first OA. Having looked at the questions, I feel that I might as well have not applied at all as I can’t even get through them
2. Research: My advisor hasn’t said too much about my research progress but my gut feel is that he thinks it’s slow. I’m in conversation with a big tech company about doing research with them in the fall with the potential for a FT return offer, and my advisor has a say in whether I can do the collaboration/internship. So I definitely need to do well in research.
3. Startup: My cofounders and I have been working hard on sales but feature implementation has been slow. The feature requests are pretty critical in getting paying clients, so one day of waiting may mean a customer can churn.

The worst part is that every time I come back, my body feels so drained and I don’t want to do work any more, but I also kinda have to. I still have another 4 weeks to go for my internship and I’m wondering how to allocate my time.

Other than for a very specific, time-critical reason, e.g. an upcoming launch or being on-call, is there ever a good reason to "burn the midnight oil" by deviating from one's normal life routine to put in more work hours?

Here's what I see this deviation looking like:

• taking fewer breaks in the day - so instead of going for a walk after 2 hours, doing it after 3
• within a work-bloc, having longer time spent at your desk - so sitting interrupted at your desk for over an hour, for example. If you're following the health gurus, you should be standing up often, and the Pomodoro technique is classically 25-minute focus blocks, but I don't know how practical this is
• cutting out gym time to get more work done - for me, exercise is generally 1 - 1.5 hours of time which I do 3 or 4 times a week, so I can get more keyboard time in if I cut it.
• working later into the night and either cutting into sleep time or just waking up later the next day

These are all examples of trying to eke out more productivity. The last 2 in general are frowned upon from a health-standpoint.

In my case, I'm onboarding and think I'm behind on my first ticket, hence the motivation for my question.

I know quality (spending my time in the right way) is a lot more important than quantity, but quantity is easier to add as so many people have pointed out on this site.

Yesterday, I had a new coworker, someone I had never spoken with before spend 4 hours on the phone with me and that was both practically helpful and psychologically helpful. Getting help like that in general is a lot more productive than just throwing more time alone at a problem. Just trying to add more context.

Thanks!

When does being a code machine act as a disadvantage?

I identify as ND (NeuroDivergent) and when I am able to build an app in a day (like hackathon style), fix a bug, solve a problem, the disadvantage I have noticed from time-to-time if I am not highly cognizant of my ability to take breaks (timing my tasks), I forget to eat meals or do basic things (like use the bathroom)? It is much like the stereotype of Poppy Li in Mythic Quest unfortunately. How do we manage this better when there is a value in being productive in output, but an undervaluing of our bodies, and sustainability?

Do we need extra reminders on our Apple Watch (or other Smart Watches), pomodoro technique to be able to tell us to take more breaks even if we are on a roll finishing a ton of code? What strategies have worked well for the code machine archetype to get their work done but without burning themselves out?

I know to some this may come as a shock.

But I've just been this way since I was a young'un

I don't have to look at the keyboard (unless it's a password) but I just wanted to get it off my chest.

I have been tasked to port a project of porting a ML project that has been running on someone's laptop to the cloud and make it production ready. It is very difficult for this person to give the full picture of the process.

This could be due to he is not actually remembering very well, given that the project has been actually done 1 year ago, or he doesn't like to lose the single point of failure / control situation.

I actually don't care about the reason and I want to get this project to success.

How may I deal with this situation?

Current blocker is that I am unable to properly estimate the time it may take for this project.