Productivity Q&A and Videos

I'm on-call this week and I'm met once again with a strong sense of not having a clue what I'm doing. I know the majority of the job of engineering is trying to work within a legacy system but I feel like I'm missing tactics to help me make any progress at all. That and having to switch contexts to address alarms and queries has meant that I actually made no progress today whatsoever so this is part rant and part question - any tips on confronting a wall of overwhelm and making progress towards the most impactful bugs?

I think most people will default to how many hours you put into work. But at what point do we say someone is working hard? Is it working 40hours/week? 50hours/week? or 80-100hours/week?

And how do these hours vary by geography?

As a Senior software engineer working at a mid-size tech company, I’m still learning how to properly push back when others Sr SWE & managers or Directors from Web or Mobile team tried to get me to do tasks that do not match my own priority.  As much as I like to be nice and support others, I agree that I can only do so much.  I brought this up with my direct manager and my Director (L7 Senior Manager & L8 Director), and they told me to loop them in when I face overwhelming pressures from other engineers/ cross-functional teams. My direct manager also told me they wants me to be able to focus on big project initiative, and they see that I am on track to be the Tech Lead given my current trending.

While I do appreciate that my boss gives me words of assurance and direction and offered to step in to fend off those pressures during my one-on-one call, I recognize that I would have to be the person who is good on establish priorities and be able to push back on people. I cannot really rely on my boss to do the push-back to fend off the pressure given that with the recent layoff, we are short on staff.

Wanted to get some thoughts and suggestions on "How can I push back diplomatically against an overwhelming amount of tasks"?

I have been working from home since 2020. From 2020-2021, I used to work in a healthcare startup with lots of responsibility, tons of work, crazy deadlines and needed to firefight incidents on a daily basis. The managers used to keep us on our toes and everyone was expected to put in more hours than the standard 40 hours/week. I was pretty much working most of my waking hours so productivity was not my concern. I did learn a lot but eventually burnt out.

I took a year off to do my masters and joined my present company in June 2022. It's a much bigger company with amazing culture, clear processes and I have very supportive and brilliant teammates. No one micromanages me. There is still good amount of responsibility and tons of work. In this environment I also want to give my best. While my productivity is great when in office, I do feel I am at 70-80% productivity level when working from home. We follow a hybrid model where we go to office twice a week.

Being in rent crazy Singapore, I do not have the luxury of having a separate office space at home. I do have a proper desk setup and enough things going on to be productive.

I want to be more productive in days I am WFH.

Have tried keeping up a schedule, wearing noise cancelling headphones, listening to binaural beats.

But nevertheless I do find myself on my bed after a couple of hours of work and it becomes difficult to resume work again. Also I tend to be hard on myself for taking that rest and the day just spirals from there.

I have tried working from cafes and even going to office every day. But along with going to gym, commutting and cooking healthy food I am too tired at the end of the day.

I really want to be more productive when WFH so that I can also manage the other parts of my life well. My team doesn't care where I work as long as the work is done.

Would like some tips on how to be a better remote worker and manage the entire day better.

When I look at my life, there's a lot of social media and technology services I use:

• At work - Outlook and Teams
• Keeping up with Tech Content - LinkedIn, YouTube, and Newsletters
• Personal - Whatsapp, Facebook, SMS, Spotify
• General - Phone and Gmail

I'm trying to develop healthy habits around technology use to facilitate deep work. This involves limiting my exposure to technology.

One strategy I think is a good one is batching checking these things. So only check content sites weekly. A more extreme strategy and one I'm not yet prepared to make is getting rid of my smartphone so I can't check content as often.

Do people have other strategies/habits which work for them or can describe their relationships with these services?

I am a Backend Engineer at a Platform Team.

Our team currently owns 9 micro services which serve as a platform which other teams use through the company.

5/9 of these services are actively being worked on and the rest are just running without any changes/ enhancements.

I have been working for the past 8 months on one of the services but haven’t had much exposure to others.

I want to learn about the others, how the data flows between them and how the overall system design is. I am just going through tons of design RFCs and reading code but with little understanding.

My primary motivation is to

1. Understand more of our scope and work on them.
2. Move out of my comfort zone.
3. Handle On Call tasks better where understanding code is needed more than just following runbook.

How can I better understand at the service level?

I’ve been a senior FEE at Amazon for almost a year now, and I’m still figuring out time management.

Sometimes I get overly involved in others’ tasks, or have too many meetings, or get overwhelmed by all the new campaigns and estimation requests constantly coming through the door while we’re in the middle of meeting deadlines.

How do senior FAANG engineers balance their priorities without overworking or burning out?

P.S. it’d be amazing if Taro can get Steve Huynh (PE at Amazon) to talk about this topic in detail.

Everyone has heard of the 80/20 rule. I was wondering as an intern / junior engineer, what are the few things that I need to do that will give me the most impact on my career prospects?

I joined Tiktok coming from not such a big company & fast culture. I had two projects where I needed to read massive code bases for tasks. The code base is in C++. A language I haven't used in years. How should I go about it?

Should I spend time learning the language before diving into the code or otherwise? I feel under-confident; other engineers scan & understand code even when they don't know the language too well.

I've been on a quest to find the best office chair for the past 2 months. You might think it's insane to spend so much time to find the perfect office chair, but if you are sitting on a chair 8+ hours/day for 10+ years, I think it's very reasonable to do the upfront work to make sure you have a chair that fits your body and encourages good ergonomics. I've also been going to PT for my back since last year, which was also a motivating factor to do more research into ergonomic office chairs.

I've tried out the following chairs:

• Herman Miller Aeron
• Herman Miller Mirra 2
• Herman Miller Embody
• Crandall Steelcase Leap V2
• Steelcase Gesture
• Haworth Fern

Despite trying out all of these different chairs, I haven't found a "perfect" chair that has good lumbar support and a supportive seat cushion. Some chairs will have a supportive seat cushion, but lack lumbar support. On some chairs, the lumbar support will be perfect, but I will bottom out on the seat cushion after 15 minutes.

The perfect chair for me would be a combination of the Fern's tall backrest, the Gesture's lumbar support, and the Crandall Leap V2 seat cushion.

I'm leaning towards either the Steelcase Gesture or the Haworth Fern for now. But, I'm going to try a Steelcase Amia next, which is actually the most affordable chair out of them all. The seat felt great, but the real test is how the seat holds up after sitting on it for a long period of time.

What office chair do you use?

(Also, I'm sure the best answer for better back health is to stand more 🙂)