Productivity Q&A and Videos

Hello everyone,

As a senior engineer L5 in my company for 1 year, I recently found myself in a new team with a new direct manager but report to the same Director in the same Org due to the recent company restructure/company reorganization as part of layoff changes. My Director and I are the direct responsible individuals for the Backend Platform System for the last 1 year. However, I am finding that a significant portion of my time is being taken up by "glue work," such as onboarding new teammates, updating the Wiki, documenting On-call Runbook, mentoring cross-functional team members, providing code reviews for new developers, and unblocking people in their code development. While these tasks seem important, they are making it difficult for me to focus on my own projects.

In my first one-on-one, my new manager expressed a desire for me to take on new initiatives. I am eager to do so, but I need to be able to focus on my own work to make this possible. My manager understood that the frequent on-call support was a blocker for me and asked me to train and onboard a new teammate to take over the on-call support, as well as field requests from users and help others with their work. However, I have still found myself doing a lot of training and providing support even two weeks since my last meeting.

I would like to hear from others who have found a way to balance these responsibilities effectively. How can I prioritize my own work while still contributing to the team's success? I know this will be a difficult decision, and I'm not sure how to approach it. I'm worried that if I stop doing some of these tasks, it may impact my relationship with my manager and team.

If anyone has faced a similar challenge, I would appreciate hearing about how you approached it. Did you stop doing certain tasks and responsibilities, and if so, how did it affect your relationship with your team? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

I often find myself in situations with engineers on the level above me (I'm a mid) where they are grasping the mental models, comprehending the code Infront of them and managing to remember a lot of context that helps them as they work through problems. I'm personally left feeling a bit dazed and confused. I was wondering if there are any more senior engineers here who recall having similar experiences when they were a lower level and how they overcame those feelings to move more productively through code when working with someone else.

We maintain a healthy suite of E2E tests, which does catch regressions sometimes before release.

It is hard to keep track of it all manually, but I believe that each time a regression is caught before release, it's overall positive on time spent. Each instance of this happening saves time which would have spent hot-fixing the issue in production if the regression wasn't able to be caught early by the tests.

How can I verify my hypothesis and make sure that this overall E2E testing effort is well-run, impactful, and net positive with engineering time investment?

I'm working on my side project. A web app.

I know a little of html and css just the basics but now I want to extend my app and make it more visually attractive and I noticed I went to Udemy to look for Modern CSS course etc.

It will take me 20+ hours just to know what to do plus the time I take doing the work.

This approach is not working for me and not gonna finish the project by the deadline I set myself.

What are your thoughts? How you learn something while applying it at the same time?

In an 8-hour workday, how much of it should be spent actually working? Caveat: I know this will vary for people. But what are the "bounds" if they exist?

I officially have a 1 hour lunch break. However, I like to add a half-hour walk in the afternoon and a half-hour nap. So now I'm only working for 6 hours.

With AI being all the rage and that only becoming more so, I'm trying to predict the future of development along with the rest of the developer community. According to , the next big thing is ChatGPT plugins to your IDE so it has the context of your entire project when you ask questions. This will allow it to generate a lot more code.

Assuming this is the near future, is there any way to prep for that now?

Are there other developments on the horizon that we can/should try and prep for?

I’m a junior/mid with 1.5 YOE who has learnt to touch type recently with a speed of around 65 wpm.

I’ve read a lot of the q&as on productivity and code velocity and have even watched Rahul’s YT vid on working efficiently in Android (IDE shortcuts etc.)

Will I be able to perform at the velocity needed for an E4 at say meta with only a 65 wpm typing speed?

What do people feel is acceptable for a top-tier tech company?

I am getting overwhelmed with my work, in this team for about 1 year. How should I optimize to squeeze time to help others?

Helping others gives me more joy than doing my own work :) . that is not my core work though.

Even being a Taro premium user, I'm unable to participate in all the events, though I heavily need mentorship, seems like a roadblock for me because on LinkedIn I see so many posts, it's very difficult to catch up.

Looking for resources on increasing your team's / peer's productivity. I thought I've seen some videos / posts in the past about this and wanted to brainstorm some ways I can boost the productivity of those around me.

My manager said to me in 1:1 that I take too much time to context switch from one task to the other. He said I can do a better job on my whole multi-tasking approach toward work.

Any tips on how to improve?

I watched the video I am particularly interested in the point: "Great TLs sequence their project in such a way that all the highest risk things get knocked out first". Can you please give examples of doing that in a real life? What are some examples of activities that you found higher risk than others and therefore you decided to do them first to minimize the risk?

Hi everyone,

I am currently a software engineering intern in Google. My main goal is to get a return offer after I complete my internship.

Based on my conversation with my intern manager, the high level metrics for success as an intern are definitely technical problem solving, collaboration and feedback etc. This is highly aligned with Alex's videos on the Internship series, where he described that an intern's main performance metric is code volume. I have also learnt that finishing a project drastically increases one's chance for a grad offer based on interns who converted to FTE.

However, I noticed that there are a lot of opportunities for events and mentoring. My current strategy is to focus most of my time in the project while networking mainly in the team to make sure I have a great relationship with them. Occasionally, I meet another employee once a week or so. At the same time, I noticed that most interns are using most of their time to meet with other FTEs from all over the world and other teams.

I personally find that a large codebase with so many contexts and 12 weeks to be the main factors on why I am a bit more conscious of my own time.

Is my current strategy to focus on the project and networking mostly with my current team optimal for a return offer? If not, are there anything else that I should be focused on?