Productivity Q&A and Videos

I just joined a brand new team, formed 6 weeks ago. This job is a big step up in responsibility for me, and it's asking me to operate in a manner that I'm unfamiliar with, such as building OKRs and roadmaps for my team - these OKRs and roadmaps will then be used by our cross functional partners. I feel an immense sense of responsibility that I'm not sure I can uphold my end of the bargain, since I feel like I simply there's so much unknown around product requirements and technical constraints. I don't know if I just power through it by working more to discover some of these constraints (which is what I'm mostly trying to do right now).

For the record, my manager says I'm doing great having recently joined the team. However, I constantly feel like I'm behind because I think I should be giving everyone the feeling I've got things under control, but I don't think I'm giving that impression (because that's not true...). How do I deal with this feeling? I feel like I will be feeling this way for some time since I think I have a lot to learn...

We're software engineers -- we use computers a lot! And yet, there are probably lots of things that we're doing inefficiently.

Let's create a thread of quick hacks/shortcuts that can save us time. Doesn't have to be related to programming.

The thing where people go "ooh, I didn't know you could do that!"

How would you spend you first 30 days to achieve the an impactful start (ideally from a staff perspective):

• What would you prioritize?
• What questions would you ask?
• When given your first tasks, what additional/beyond scope extras would you consider?
• What would you be mindful of NOT to do?
• How would you start prepping to figure out what to become an SME in?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company. My team has some E6 work that I'd love to take on, but my PM prioritized some E4 work above it. Since the only other iOS engineer on my team is E6, my EM asked me to take on the E4 work while the E6 works on the E6 work. The E4 work is scoped to about a month's worth of work, but I worry that scope creep may drag things out further. I've been at this company for close to 3 years on various teams. For the majority of that time, I've been saddled with E4 work (and sometimes even E3 work) that has taken valuable time away from working towards E6. I was hired as an E5. Is there a way to avoid spending time doing lower-level work to focus on getting to the next level? For what it's worth, I got Exceeds on my latest performance review.

Hi all,

I joined my current company (known in our industry for not-so-good WLB) 6 months ago as a Senior Software Engineer and have been doing side hustle in the evening and weekends over past 6 months beside my main job. This means I still completed the 9am to 6pm work schedule before doing my side hustle.

Now my manager is saying I have low bug fix count and my team consists of some weekends workaholics which I suspect I’m being benchmarked against. My upcoming performance review is due end of December 2023 (1 month away). The expectation for my level is ramping up in 3 months which means the last 3 months are no longer considered ramp-up period.

What should I do in this last 1 month leading to the performance review? Should I go all in on the weekends too or should I keep the pace I’m working (I’ve started working in the evening from 7PM to 10PM since receiving this feedback 2-3 weeks ago but on weekends I still hustle). Was I wrong in doing side gigs / projects while ramping up for my full time job and should have instead pushed weekends to ramp up? What could have I done better in the past 6 months and moving forward in 1 month ahead?

I know Rahul talked about doing side contract gigs and Alex talked about doing side projects while both are still at Meta (a very demanding big tech company). How did you guys handle the pressure and what are your schedules like? (Wake up @ 4AM, work on side hustle till 6-7AM, then go to sleep at night around 12AM LOL)? I'm curious about how people organize their side gigs schedule.

Thank you for your advices. I really appreciate it.

How do you choose whether to use automated UI testing vs manual UI testing for a new web application being developed for the first time? For automated UI testing I am talking about using test automation frameworks such as Selenium in which you write code to simulate user interaction with the GUI (user clicks and data entry). Should you use automated testing from release 1 when the product GUI and features are not yet finalized and users may ask for UI changes? Or do you do manual testing for the first few releases until the product is stable and then do automated testing? Any good practices or guidelines for when and how to make that choice?

Hi guys, I found an interesting point in another thread and I don't know, what should be a correct response to it.

Here is it:

"You spent 12 hours of work on an issue and got a working solution. You submit a PR with only a day left before the sprint ends. One of your coworkers looks at your code, thinks it's good enough, but suggests a better solution you haven't thought of. What do you do?"

Especially, what if I have a bigger feature, spent one week for it and need another 3 days, if I will change my code. What would you do?

When doing a side-project to add to my resume to learn a new tool (e.g. Spark, Airflow, dbt since I'm a Data Engineer) or even a new language, how long should a good side-project take?

I know this question is incredibly ambiguous in that side-projects can have tremendous variability in terms of their depth and breadth, and I know that the best side projects (those with real users) can never end if you're constantly improving them and taking feature requests.

Still, if I'm a beginner to them and am trying to add 2-3 in the next, say, 3 months, how long (in terms of hours) should a decent side-project take?

I believe Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell says you can do a good resume project in a weekend. That's ambiguous (2 hours or 48 hours straight?), but it at least bounds it.

I'm looking for the top 3 good tools that can help me boost productivity.

There are a plethora of tools but no proper reviews for them.

I'm looking for tools that are easily integrable (No code) but are of high value.

Pass links so that we can try it out.

In the age of IDEs with autocomplete, chat gpt and copilot does it makes sense to learn it?

I have seen Devs who use Vim browse through files and make changes at tremendous speed and am curious if it's a good tool to improve my productivity.

I did do a bit of Vim during my bachelor's but mostly used IDEs in all my jobs. It will take me some time to learn and make the switch but I feel it's a good time to learn it.

Also what is the importance of setting up your tooling and IDEs in being able to code faster.

My manager told me in my 1:1 that he would like to see me working more independently. He had few points for me like utilize other engineers to unblock and have more discussions on team channel. I feel like I already work quite independently. I drive discussions on my own and involve stakeholders as needed. I speak out whenever I see any issue or I've something to contribute.

I'm trying to understand what can I do more here and show my manager I'm already doing what he's suggesting.

I'm in process for L5 promotion and I feel this feedback can negatively impact my chances.

TIA.

More often than not, problems are enlisted in quarterly roadmaps.

From a tech complexity perspective, how do you evaluate problems which are highly complex in nature. If such problems don't exist in my team or if they exist but don't generate high outcome, should I look for outside my team to solve such problems?

Recently, I was required to work on multiple things in parallel. Like 1-2 features and couple of bugs.

In theory there are dead moments, like waiting 20 minutes for a build, that I can use to do something else. But even in those 20 minutes I feel like my context belongs to that task and it seems hard to switch the branch and investigate a bug while the build is running because of the context switch and when the build is done I have to come back to the previous task and re-switch context.

Also the pressure of knowing that I have to deliver multiple things is very stressing. Even though they might not be complicated things, the pressure alone of knowing that I have multiple items and the deadline is coming is very harmful.

Is there any "trick" or effective way to work on multiple items at the same time without feeling like "drowning" and to not be affected by the multiple deadlines pressure?

I have been working less than a year at Meta and am just unable to understand and jell with the culture. There are a few main things contributing to me feeling burnt out.

Endless number of things to do...

There is equal emphasis on contributions to all axis and there is barely any overlap in the work that I need to do in order to meet expectations on all of them (except maybe Impact and Direction)

Better engineering projects that my team has scoped out are very separate from Impact projects

For people axis, I have to drive org level impact which is a thing of its own and adds on to the BE projects and impact projects.

Our oncall is extremely tough since we have a huge number of products with code dating back to 10 years ago.

Due to all this it feels like I'm having to do 4 jobs at once.

Process is bloated...

Especially for impact projects that result in changes to the product, there are a huge number of people involved, UX, DS, DE, 2 major orgs who are our customers and their representatives, Content, PM and business leaders. I get pinged for dates and status updates by 5 different people for either the same or different things every day. It is hard to keep up with and as someone who has some ADHD traits (unofficial diagnosis) and an introverted personality, just getting pinged and keeping up with responses feels exhausting let alone the coding aspect. Meta lives by its bottom up culture but in our org it just doesn't seem like its working. In my previous job, process was barely something I had to think of, and mind you we did weekly releases to 3 environments.

Laser focussed PSC conversations...

From having performance conversations 2 times per year to now having them 2 times a month seems like an extreme overkill and adds to the stress at all times. It isn't just the frequency. PSC self reports are so heavily dissected for every single word, every single metric that doing PSC right feels like a project in itself. so now it's 4 + 1 = 5 jobs.

What should I do? PSC season is again around the corner. Practically speaking I have a few options I want to get some thoughts on.

1. Change teams (requires an exception since it hasn't been a year)
2. Leave meta (and payback some comp components and say good bye to crazy TC)
3. Take a medical leave (still risk getting dinged at PSC)
4. Stick it out until the 1 year mark and revisit above options.

Remote work can be great, but personally in my first year of doing it in 2020 I loved it for the first 2 weeks and then started struggling more over the next months. I really enjoy it now coming up on 4 years working remote, but would be great to share tips!

I'm mainly working remotely due to covid and a team distributed across time zones, but I feel like earlier-in-career engineers like myself should have more in-person work. How can I overcome the barriers of remote work?

Could be unconventional; like you have Nutella sandwich on a fishing line that dangles over your desk and gets closer with each closing of a user story.

Or could just be listening to classical music with a nice ambiance.