Productivity Q&A and Videos

I am an L4 engineer with decent knowledge of my team's stack.

What are some actions I can take to meet expectations in my current role for the next few years, while minimizing the amount of time I spend on work?

Given that I'm not shooting for a promotion, does that change how I should approach relationship building with senior folks on the team? There is a lot of advice on Taro about relationship building, but it appears to be aimed at folks who wish to promote quickly.

I’ve come to realize more and more that the greatest thing holding me back by far as a software engineer has been perfectionism. By perfectionism, I mean the mental attitude that says that what I have done isn’t good enough so I need to spend more time on it, or that I’m not ready to do something. This attitude is pretty much the opposite of Meta’s “Move fast and break things”.

Here are a few of the ways that this mindset has hobbled me throughout my career:

• University (I studied Engineering): thinking I had to read the textbook and do all the assigned questions. My GPA suffered. In reality, my time would have been better spent doing past tests/exams and forming better friendships and study groups with other students to learn what was most valuable to know. I’m speaking from both a GPA-maximizing viewpoint, but also from a long-term viewpoint in the case of better relationships with classmates.
• Immediate Post-University: Thinking that my coding skills weren’t good enough and that I needed to do a 6-month bootcamp which I did. Hindsight is 20/20, but getting my first job and working from there would probably have been better.
• First job: Struggling with moving fast. I was at a tiny (<10 people) start-up and they wanted speed. I struggled with the pace they wanted because of things like writing formulaic unit tests that didn’t add much value and needing to constantly walk through my code with a debugger. I do believe that this particular company had unrealistic, unhealthy expectations for a newbie, but I also believe I could have moved faster.
• General learning: Prioritizing online courses over side projects.
• Job Hunting: Aiming to get done 150 interview questions before applying, rather than applying and doing mock interviews from the get-go.

I believe perfectionism is particularly harmful in tech compared to other industries since things change so fast.

Maybe this is better answered by a life coach or therapist, but what are some things I can do to limit the pernicious effects of this mindset?

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 an Android engineer working on an infra team, and like every other Meta E4, I am working towards the E5 promotion. Because of this, I'm spending a good amount of time building up the non-coding skills needed for the people/direction axis, doing things like XFN alignment and project management.

My question is how "all-in" should I go developing these behaviors: How much of an engineering excellence commitment do I still need to maintain? How often should I still be landing diffs?

A year back I joined a Big Tech company as a mid-level software engineer. I had 5 years of work experience mostly in not-so-famous startups and I joined a large tech company after doing my masters.

It's been a year since I joined but I regularly feel like I don't belong here. I go through alternating waves of confidence and self-doubt. When I am not able to debug simple issues in a new microservice, I feel dumb. I feel like the senior devs on my team are just able to solve everything and I am still struggling after a year. I have been through a round of layoffs and re-org and am not sure about the kind of work I will be doing in the future.

I want to be promoted to senior engineer level but constantly get feedback that I am not assertive, opinionated, and take more time than usual to complete ambiguous tasks. I see everyone getting promoted around me and I don't understand why I can't seem to be improving. I am very motivated and willing to slog hard, but it seems like I simply don't get it or am not smart enough. Everyone around me just feels smarter and more experienced.

I feel like moving to a smaller company with not-so-high coding standards and ditching big tech because it will be more up my forte. I am aware that I won't grow there. It just feels frustrating to be stuck at a junior-mid level, 7 years after my bachelor's. But I also know I am not at that level yet.

Any advice on how to go through this problem to the other side will be lovely.

Sleep and exercise are essential for staying productive as a software engineer, but what about food and eating? Are there any particular food or eating habits that is detrimental to your productivity as a software engineer?

I’m currently working on a 0 to 1 project that’s outside of the team’s scope, so I have no senior engineer on the team to support me and tell me what to do. I have to spend a lot of time piecing things together and it's been rough - I've missed on the team's ship goals as it's hard to move fast enough on this project. How can I make this situation better?

Here's a recent example: I took 2 months to finish bootcamp, and I was very indecisive throughout that time, talking with various managers and tech leads. I initially talked to real time ads infra, then streaming areas, and many others. Even after picking a team I feel FOMO that there’s a better team I could have joined instead. How can I feel better about my decisions?

These days, I hear a lots of news about the new AI tools like Chat GPT, Bard and so on. Will we see a decline in requirements for software engineers in the foreseeable future? Will companies begin to prioritize AI-domain engineers over software engineering?

Hi Everyone,

I am a senior software engineer in my company. We are an R&D company who work for the retail industry. I work in the Computer Vision and systems area.

I joined this company as a senior software engineer. Initially, the project that I was hired for had C++ work but that project was scrapped and we worked on a new product where everything was Python and lots of DevOps tools.

Now the problem that I am facing is all my colleagues who are software engineers know a lot about Python and these tools. I have never used them so far. For me, it was exciting that I was using these new tools which were very necessary in the current industry but I was anyways slow and my code quality and the way I designed things never matched the team's ways of things. I know everybody says that the fundamental principles are the same but I found there are some pythonic ways which are way better than a person who is learning it. Additionally, I was a Senior Engineer, so the manager and lead always came to me and said that they expected more from me. I was not contributing enough.

I feel it is normal to expect things from me as I am a senior. The main problem that I face is I don't feel myself important to the team. Most of the development or coding is done by the rest of the team. I even see they are given more design and senior role work too. I am given very small things. Honestly, even I don't know if I will be able to work on designing systems using these technologies. It affects my confidence and so I am never confident in my work, I have a constant fear that I can lose my job anytime. I don't feel proud of my work anymore now. I have learnt the new tools from last 1 year but I am unable to lead the team in any direction. There are some new concepts in Computer Vision world now like Embeddings which is completely new to me I am struggling to catch up on anything.

Our product is going live very soon, so the issues and pressure have started to grow. I am not even able to build any relationships with the real stakeholders in the team. They all love my other teammates and thus keep giving them work. Whenever I try to talk to them about any issues I do not get any encouraging reply, it feels like I am giving very basic suggestions.

Can anyone advise me on how to handle and perform well in the team and above all feel recognized in the team and organization? I am pretty sure many people here would have changed technology and should have faced similar situations , many would have recovered from this situation.

I always have very high standards for myself and have always been recognized as so in my previous companies. Lately, I feel I am not feeling very proud about my work, and I feel that is the main issue. I need some advice to improve in my field and in a consistent way.

I often find myself with short blocks of time during the day. For example, I am typing this question in one such block of time right now. I have 15 minutes between the end of my morning stand-up and a debugging session that starts at 10am. I'm wondering how to use these sessions productively, but even more, I am wondering how to not use them unproductively.

It's very easy to go onto YouTube or LinkedIn (my preferred social media sites to waste time) and tell myself I'm being productive because I follow tech people I respect such as Alex and Rahul. However, I now believe that such quick checks are harmful to my productivity.

I'm reading "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and Rule #2 is Embrace Boredom. Rule #3 is Quit Social Media. Both of these rules suggest that I really need to stop checking YouTube and LinkedIn daily, and definitely multiple times a day. Since there actually is valuable content on these platforms (hello again Alex and Rahul), I'm thinking of limiting myself to only checking once a week.

In the meantime, I do have the original issue of how to spend blocks of time <30 minutes. I've solved my current issue by using it to ask this question.

I guess short blocks of time are perfect for shallow tasks like responding to email. But probably just staring into space is better than checking YouTube/LinkedIn.

Any other tips?

Say you want to research on a topic for resolving an issue and want to share with the team by creating a Google Doc. How does one master the skill of creating an high quality Doc?

My Senior team member, top performer, is super solid at creating Google Docs and churns out one great doc almost every week. He said he just focuses on just dumping out the thoughts in the first go and fixes them later on. But I feel his velocity in getting that doc out or completely the research on it is very fast. So clearly there is something that I am not understanding.

So I am looking for opinions from experts on Taro :)

At times, we face tight deadlines which I believe are challenging to meet. Despite my reservations about the feasibility of such timelines, my fellow engineer peers often express confidence in meeting them, though history has shown they're frequently mistaken. When I voice my concerns, the project managers claim that delivery is non-negotiable, and everyone in the room goes silent. I've suggested prioritizing essential features for the immediate deadline and planning for a subsequent delivery for the rest, but my ideas are usually ignored. Despite not being in a lead role, it's disheartening to later hear about our inconsistent delivery timelines from my manager when I receive performance feedback. How should I navigate these situations? It's frustrating to be the only one on my team who ever expresses these thoughts as I always appear as the "pessimistic" engineer. I just try to voice concerns to make more reliable deliveries. What should I do in these situations?

Currently, we have tech debt mainly discoverable via a custom annotation in the code.

Some examples are:

• Break complex features into separate manageable flows
• Split large classes or controllers
• Feature/part refactoring tickets with linked ticket numbers.

The core tech debt is easy to address and manageable via project boards, but the problem is the rest (product related) often gets out of date and never gets resolved, for which there are some reasons like:

• The product team has been disbanded.
• Feature no longer a priority for the product.
• The part of the code has not been touched for some time but could come into active development again.
• Find better implementation of X

I believe the product-related tech debt should be owned and tracked by the product team but often there are some tech debts left in favor of speed like - breaking complex screens, and classes, and find better approaches etc etc

What's the best way to promote ownership and address such tech debt, so that they are addressed during code reviews and not left in the code as comments indefinitely, nor as a ticket in some project board which never addressed?

I joined this new team in October and I'm finding it hard to demonstrate velocity as an entry-level developer. I'm sure this has been discussed before on this thread but what are some sure-shot things to do to increase my commit count?

I know this isn't the healthiest way to approach things but commits and reviews are the best way to demonstrate impact at the L3 level and I'm trying to maximize my impact until the end of this year.

How can I add code quickly? e.g. Add extra unit tests for edge cases, add logging statements, etc.

I'm mid level, new to the company.

I got assigned a chunk of a bigger project owned by a staff level engineer, let's call him X, who has worked on the product for a long time and has a lot of context.

Things that were new to me: the language, the tool chain, product context. The codebase is several years old.

My skip level manager (1 level above my direct manager) once encouraged that I should aim to finish my work in less than 2x the amount of time it would take X to do it (but besides this I received no pressure, or reminder to push for this target from managers).

This was overly ambitious. I worked longer hours and harder than anyone around, including weekends but still could not finish it in 3x the amount of time initially estimated.

The staff engineer overestimated what I can do too. He's very willing to explain but I had a hard time mapping his high level explanation to what happens at the code level.

I could not tell if the standard here is high or the task is too hard. So I leaned towards putting in more effort rather than voicing my concern.

I also did not have a good sense of "are these unknown parts of the code base grok-able with a little bit of time or do they require a lot of time?" to estimate time spent up front.

In the end I got some barebone thing out and he took over. Still took him a couple more weeks to get the thing finished. Along the way he solved some problems I'm sure I have no chance of solving in that timespan.

With this evidence I was sure the task was legitimately too hard for me and was comfortable letting my manager know my opinion.

Back up a little bit, when I started working on the project, my manager knew I could not stick to the original timeline set by the engineer and encouraged me to take my time to learn the codebase. What is puzzling is my manager did not tell the engineer about this unrealistic estimate. The engineer reports to a different manager and has been around way longer than my manager.

Maybe there is some politics going on that I'm not aware of.

Anyway this has been a very stressful experience.

What could I do better? What should I do to mitigate any harm done through this experience?

Layoffs are making me quite anxious. I understand job security might not really be a thing when it comes to big tech, but I do want to try pursuing employment security, if that makes sense. How do I "get good" so I can be a little more resilient when it comes to layoffs and employment? I'm not really sure where to start.

I am very much aligned and aware with needing to show impact or been seen as an SME to have visibility to move up to a staff level.

My question is one of logistics. How is this possible when you have more work to do than fits in 40 hours, let alone finding extra time to do these other things? For example if you have at least 30 hours of coding, 5 hours of code reviews or scoping documentation, 5 hours of meetings, an additional 5 hours of random things (CI broken, helping colleagues, ad hoc issues etc), where do you even begin to find time for these extra things? Especially when all of the above is barely considered meeting expectations?

I will also clarify that I don't want “get better at coding” as a valid answer. No matter how good you are, you still need to understand the many systems involved which can take a while and if you constantly have to tackle new areas, there's always discovery.

My question is more around how do you ask or “show” you should have time to work on other things. Whenever I would approach my manager with well thought out proposals, buy in, and even timelines the answer was always later.

How to effectively manage work pressure while dealing with health issues? I have taken steps to reduce my work velocity in order to prioritize my health, which was agreed upon with my manager.

However, one of the leads continues to place significant work pressure on me, despite my direct communication about the situation. It is disheartening to experience this situation, especially considering that I received a top rating after my first year at the company. Is it common to encounter such challenges in enterprise companies, even as a high-performing employee? Unfortunately, the senior leadership team has not taken sufficient actions to address this problem.

Additionally, as I am currently on a visa, changing jobs or switching teams is not an option for me at this point. I would greatly appreciate any guidance on how to handle this situation effectively.

I don't hate my job but not interested in overly performing as I am not happy with my compensation.

1. No motivation to prepare for interviews in the current market

2. I just want to do whatever is assigned to me. I have no leadership skills, no confidence. No motivation to put lot of efforts and make an impact due to low compensation to fix my leadership and communication issues. It typically takes 2.5-3 years to get promoted to next level as an average engineer like me. I have been stuck due to immigration issues. Manager has too many reportees. Hiring freeze everywhere.

Do you have any recommendation on what to do in this case?

I'm currently working in a product which was ramped down from 19 members to 5. All remaining 5 are new to product.

Current state is:

• We get lots of escalation, and it's good learning in solving them. However, pressure is enormous and also less work life balance, due to Severity 1 issues at times.
• There is no feature development for now, mainly due to less bandwidth and also all new folks in team, who are ramping up.
• There are other priorities like Maintainence of services/system (DevOps), Security, Integration with other products, minor must do feature enhancements reported by customer
• Customers are dropping because we are at times not able to provide the enhancements asked in stipulated time

When i initially started with this project, I thought it would slow down, but there are spikes at times which results in working at whole weekends (Happened four times in 2 months).

Should I leave this product and try to move to other product or company where i should look for balanced work and timeline, product with active development or continue in current one with an hope it would slow down in near future?

I am on a tight deadline to deliver an impactful and complex feature. Whenever I send my PR out for review, my lead takes at least 2-3 days to start reviewing the code. Then, there are either a lot of non actionable comments or feedback on tests. So I started sending out a test plan in advance which also receives a lot of feedback. When I turnaround with a refined PR, the lead again takes 2-3 days for a review. I am worried that there are too many iterations for a simple PR and I am chasing the lead for reviews. When I hinted about the review taking time, I got a response that the code shouldn’t have had so many flaws to begin with. The code doesn’t have bugs, he was nit picking on unit tests that could be refactored for better maintainability. I agree, but should that be a show stopper?

I had my code reviewed by a peer and received feedback that there are no blocking changes and the code is mergeable. For a complex feature, I expected 1-2 iterations but each iteration is draining and am starting to wonder if I am really that bad an engineer. The biggest problem is that the reviews happen in person and the reviewer gets nasty and yells at times. He is extremely rude and after a few minutes he tries to explain that all the feedback is for my own good like I'm a kid. I expect some amount of professionalism but I feel disrespected because of the attitude. Is it normal for 2-3 iterations for a slightly complex PR and should I have to chase reviewers each time? Do you any tips on handling the behavioral issues?

What is the prevailing culture within the organization, and how does it manifest in day-to-day operations and decision-making? The prevailing culture within an organization is the shared values, beliefs, norms, and practices that shape the social and psychological environment of a business. This culture influences employee behavior, motivates management styles, and affects decision-making processes. What are those for Meta?

What are the hidden things to notice and to worry about? For example:

1. Cliques and Silos: Pay attention to the formation of exclusive groups or departments unwilling to share information. This can indicate a fragmented culture that hinders collaboration.

2. Resistance to Change: If there is noticeable resistance to new ideas or changes in procedure, the culture may be rigid and resistant to innovation.

3. Overwork and Burnout: A culture that consistently expects long hours and overwork may prioritize short-term gains over long-term employee well-being and sustainability.

4. Turnover Rates: High employee turnover can be a red flag for issues within the organizational culture such as lack of growth opportunities, poor management, or a toxic work environment.

5. Office Politics: Pay attention to how much politics influence decisions and progress. A culture heavily influenced by politics rather than merit can demotivate employees.

6. Feedback Mechanisms: Lack of mechanisms for providing constructive feedback, or a culture where feedback is ignored, can indicate a culture not open to self-improvement or employee development.

7. Diversity and Inclusion: Observe whether the organization actively supports diversity and inclusion, not just in policy but in practice, reflecting a culture of respect and equality.