Productivity Q&A and Videos

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 🙂)

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...

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?

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.

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!"

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.

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?

As I go through the lectures on Taro, it seems like we need to have a lot of ownership, deal with ad-hoc problems to help the team, review a lot of code, refactor, and etc.

I feel like this is really hard in a scrum setting where we know what we exactly we are going to do that sprint, and if we do not work on the assigned tasks, our projects get delayed, missing deadlines.

I wanted to know what the correct approach is here, do we try to think this beforehand and allocate some sprint points for these tasks? Or as we become higher level engineers, are we just expected to work more? Is it a realistic view that senior engineers could work 40 hours per week, or is that almost impossible?

For me, I feel like I have a pattern of getting pulled into these tasks during my sprints and sometimes missing my deadlines by few days and so have adapted to avoiding these tasks. How could I avoid missing deadlines and still work on these tasks, at the same time maintaining work life balance?

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.

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.

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?

I've heard this many times be true for senior and above level SWEs at FAANGMULA companies, but wasn't sure how true this was?

As I look to take on other interviews at FAANGMULA companies, the main issue for me when it comes to role whether a senior SWE or EM/TPM is time. Will I have inevitably with more meetings as a senior EM/TPM because of management by itself and having to work over 40 hours/wk in order to get promoted or stay at my level (I have heard this is the case at some FAANGMULA companies), or is it possible to be a code machine and manage your own team and workload to the point that it is automated you can build your own side projects (like how some people build their startups on the side while working "full time" at a FAANGMULA company)?

Personally, I still have the entrepreneurial itch and want to continue working on something on the side, but have issue with working at FAANGMULA 40+ hours a week in order to maintain my level and be promoted, if I know it is indeed possible to be more efficient with my time and achieve my metrics/results with half the time (say 20-30 hours a week instead of 40-60 that I'm hearing is quite common for some senior SWEs as ICs or managers).

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.

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.