Productivity Q&A and Videos

In tech, there are an endless amount of books and articles to read, and videos to watch. My browser tabs have grown to the point where I use Onetab to bookmark tab groups that I will eventually get around to...

I also have a long list of improvements, tech debt, and ideas for work and personal that I implement when I have the time. I prioritize and accomplish things every week, but I still feel perpetually behind. This is an internal struggle I deal with, and I don't think this feeling will ever go away. What do you recommend I do to finally feel like I am ahead of the ball?

Should I check it first thing in the morning to see if I have any urgent things to work on or should I try and continue working on whatever project I was working on the previous day and try and crank out that couple hours of productive work above all else?

I joined my current company a bit more than a year ago as an L4. Within 4 months, I'd launched a high stakes project, and after some churn in the team leadership, I was put into the role of being a tech lead to my remaining team of L3s.

As a pseudo TL, I did well in the mentorship and technical guidance responsibilities, but my code output dropped drastically (due to my projects being in the design phase which were being done by my juniors with me providing high level guidance).

In the last three months, I suffered some mental health issues. My work productivity dropped significantly during that time. I've been very open with my manager about my mental state throughout this process, and they've been very supportive of the things I need to do to recover. Around this time my team also hired an L5, who is now officially the TL.

Due to my drop in performance in the latter half of the year, I'm afraid my manager won't trust me with important projects. I wonder if I need to again prove my credentials to keep me on track for L5. I feel very low about my software development abilities.

This has made me demotivated and disinterested in my work. I took a couple weeks off, yet I don't feel like going back to work. I'm not considering changing teams due to immigration issues. I also don't want to leave a team on a low.

Any tips on turning around my motivation, and trajectory on the team? What can I change in my mindset and working style to overcome my struggles?

Hi all. I suck at following deadline. Every time I signup for some task, I end up either being a mediocre or finish it late passing deadline. I want to come out of this vicious cycle. Please don't suggest things like set timer, break big tasks to small tasks, use calendar all those. It doesn't help me. Please suggest some practical solutions that can be followed. TIA

I am a junior engineer, and I am worried that the code velocity that I have right now, which is about 1-2 quality commits per week (By quality commits, I refer to ~100-200 lines of core code) is too slow.

I understand that not all code is the same, and code quality >> code quantity, and this job is a lot more than just coding. However, I am curious as to on average, how many quality commits would expect a junior vs senior vs staff to churn out in a week? Should one even be asking this question, is there a better way that I can frame my mentality towards this?

I tend to give everything my all, which is what I did back in school. I overdid it back then, so I needed a long break afterwards. I want to make sure I don't make the same mistake with my career - What can I do to prevent burnout while still achieving lots of impact and growth?

I work as a mid-level software engineer. We have team channels where people can reach us on. But for some reason people always message me in a private message or they visit my office for team related tasks or product owner tasks. I keep telling them to ask the person in charge or communicate through our team channel, but they don't.

I don't want to be rude to them, yet I find my frustration growing. Sometimes I feel like they can't bother to formalise their requests, so they go to me to quickly mention whatever is bothering them, so they later can refer to our "discussion" if the issue is brought up again.

What should I do?

Hi! I have trouble what to do if I am in a team with detecting how to tell if the person is genuinely helping and not trying to babysit? To me it is hard to tell the difference, once in my previous company I assumed they helped me, so i always ask for help, but in the end my manager and my team member default reaction is to not letting me to work alone, this is so frustrating and it is hard for me to get into senior position and proud of my work. Now I am in my current company I strived for independence but my manager end up give me feedback that I should collaborate enough, but sometimes I feel that he never let me to work alone.

I read one of your article and I know that we suppose to collaborate and discuss, and I did discussion with some engineers and I can solve the problem, but my manager still says that. I have trouble to see what is the cause, in the end I want to be the person that is great to work with but not spoiled (babysitted everytime). If there are people who tried to babysit you, can you give suggestions on how to react politely, as I don't want to block collaboration and block myself at the same time? Thank you!

I’ve had trouble with this historically, my output per day is inconsistent. I’ll have days where I grind for 12 hours, and other days where I don’t really do anything.

Here are some of the ways I have unproductive days:

• “I’ll just watch this YouTube video”
• “I’ll just grab this snack”
• “I’m blocked by this person”

Recently I completed my first-ever proof of concept (POC). I got positive feedback, but I think it's because the manager understands that I am doing this independently for the first time. After giving credit for my work, one senior member broke down the task into smaller pieces with step-by-step technical sources (from blogs), which made my life much easier. Now when I am re-evaluating this now, I observe the following:

• I tried not to bother senior/TL for help since I didn't want to interrupt their sprint commitment. Even though they are supportive, I couldn't help but feel nervous because I am the engineer with the least experience (i.e., others are either senior or principal level or the same level but have a much broader knowledge domain).
• After receiving the breakdown plan with the easy-to-follow resources, I am much more comfortable tackling the tasks. If possible, I very much want to be able to break down a bigger POC into smaller pieces and tackle each in order.

Since it's likely to have more POC shortly, and I am sure I will face this situation, I want to overcome the nerve and ask the right amount of questions (not too much, but good enough to unblock me) during growth along the POC task.

Thanks ahead for your sharing!

I have only been working at North American tech company for 9 months now. And for most of projects I have worked on till now, I have been super fast and finished my work mostly before deadline/estimate. My question is can this fast work backfire on me? My manager has always praised me but can it be bad like me being disliked by team mates or having problems in future? Should I slow down and finish it slowly (In that case, I am not sure what do I update in project syncs if I have been lazying around and not doing much)? Or continuing at speed will be beneficial for me?

Sometimes we can’t make progress on our tasks due to situations outside our control. For example: waiting someone to review our code, waiting for a permission approval, a meeting that got pushed back, etc.

Are there ways I can continue to make progress and impact while waiting for these?

I considered having a side project and work on it when I can’t progress in my main task, or getting started on a future task to address it more quickly when I officially start it.

I work on a product that runs on a variety of architectures, with code split across many GitHub repositories. We have a complicated build process. When making changes, I often struggle to find a way to run those changes efficiently (i.e. outside of the CI process). This is made worse when I need to make changes that also change the build process or need to run debugging tools like GDB.

When I onboarded, I was told that everyone has their own setup by people who've been on the team since its inception. It seems like people newer than myself have figured it out, even with how messy and changing everything is. However, I've been here for over a year and the team tends to work quite independently. Occasionally, folks will be quite helpful for a point or two, but generally everyone's stretched a bit thin and tends to focus on their tickets. My manager has also rebuffed any requests for collaboration or mentorship since I started, saying that I'm expected to be independent to show I'm ready for the next level. He did say I could that I could try to change the team's culture to be more collaborative if I wanted to take initiative, but that's not what's expected of a software engineer, especially if I want to do well and get promoted.

This question may be more about how to correctly get answers answered when you're no longer new, but I also feel that building (CMake, Docker, environment setup, package management, etc.) is slowing me down. Are there good processes for getting more efficient at building components/systems and unblocking yourself faster?

I am currently doing some ETL (extract transform load)

But the Transform part of the operation takes a minute or two. I am having issues with the "load" part of my script where I need to update a DB with the transformed data

Pain point: It takes me a minute or two to get the transform outputs and it really slows down my coding velocity + feedback loop bc most of my time is spent waiting for the code to run

With a recent, completely unexpected reorg, the product my team owns has effectively been cancelled and will be sunsetted. The company is trying to figure out new scope for my team, but in the meantime, I don't really have stuff to work on. Here are my questions:

1. Is having 1-2 months of downtime like this okay for my job and career?
2. What can I do in the meantime to be productive? I've mainly just been doing auxiliary things like reading documentation.

Often I feel mentally and physically exhausted heading home from work. I started at the company 2 months ago and in total, I have just under a year’s experience working in industry. Maybe it’s because things are quite new, or is this a sign that I’m needlessly struggling?

[Context]

I try to laser in on what I’m meant to be doing, so I can get code running and testing asap but reading code takes up more time than I’d like, as I try and figure out what the service is actually doing, not only in terms of code but in the context it’s meant to be used in- It’s a systematic hedge fund and finance is new to me.

Data engineer here. Manager is the leading a project which is severely mismanaged and he just demands results. He doesn't plan at all. There is no proper project planning and it is XFN project. If I do project management tasks it saps my energy due to numerous meetings in order to do that. Project has been going on for 8 months. Everyone working knows it is not going anywhere. Just that manager wants us to keep working on it. Even our org doesn't recognize it as a critical project. Problem is continuing to work on it takes time away from other interesting work which has more impact.

What do you suggest? How do you suggest I approach this?

I have 3+ years of coding experience, primarily in Java, and working in a Fintech startup. The backend is primarily powered via Spring Boot here.

I heavily use Gen AI services like ChatGPT & ClaudeAi while coding. While this has helped me learn new things, I am beginning to see a mental pattern emerge.

I often find myself generating code rather than writing it myself. Sometimes this also leads to drag, as I am left explaining the context to GenAi. The pro is that I perhaps get a more optimal, finetuned code leveraging the large language model's knowledge capabilities.

Is that an optimal path I am headed for? Or should I introduce an emergency tweak in how I work to better my career as a stronger, confident software engineer?

Thanks.

Hi everyone, I am a software engineer since 5 years now.

Over time, I have realized that I am ambitious but not competitive. I do my work as I enjoy doing the same and when my heart is in it. This has two facets:

1. I am not bothered when someone is doing better than me. I am loved by all. Nobody sees me as a threat. I love helping everyone.
2. Without feeling competitive, there are times when I lack the motivation at work. This also means I don't have the heart to snatch or ask for the better projects of my colleagues when I know they really want to do it. I am fairly excluded from the power hunger games.

I want to seek advise on what are the ways you have sustained your motivation at work and your ambition to climb the career ladder if not for competition? How much has a competitive spirit fuelled your career growth?

I'm reading "Deep Work" by Cal Newport about the value of long periods of focus, non-interrupted concentration to career success. This advice is especially relevant to software engineers where it helps to get into a flow state. I already don't have my inbox open all the time and check it between tasks. I'm wondering about going the next step and turning off Teams notifications. This seems like a big move because that allows my boss and coworkers to reach me instantly anytime. It also allows them to see when I'm online. So my question is, is this something that one can "get away with doing" at most workplaces? Obviously for me, I can just try it and see what happens and/or ask my manager about it. Just wondering if this would fly at most tech companies.

I'm really excited about my new role as a mid-level backend engineer and have been soaking up everything on Taro about onboarding – it's been super helpful! My aim is to ramp up quickly by delivering small wins regularly and asking enough questions to move beyond the newbie phase. I've got a great onboarding buddy and plenty of support, but no one's handing out tasks. Instead, I get to pick from the todo-list. So, I'm wondering: should I focus on infrastructure tasks or feature tasks?

The infrastructure work is appealing because it's a chance to dive into microservice infrastructure, something I haven't done before (my last job was more traditional on-prem SOA). But I'm also thinking feature tasks might be better for getting a broader understanding of the system and services. I don't want to be a bottleneck for the team, and infrastructure improvements seem like they could be done in parallel without impacting critical deadlines, but it's also an easy way to get nerd-sniped I'd imagine.

Any input is appreciated!

wanted some advice up here. As of late I have observed myself slacking at work. I used to enjoy doing the work I did but as of late it feels repetitive, and even though there is so much scope to learn, I get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of it and let it go. My coding skills have also deteriorated and I haven’t had any promotion the 4 years that I have been here and am still a mid level engineer.

Had a convo with my manager and he said to create more impact to be a senior engineer. I am going through at the moment but how to overcome getting overwhelmed at work, and take it slow and one at a time? I am also looking into creating my EB1 profile as well but am very confused right now. How can I be a better engineer? Any suggestions and tips to keep in mind to be motivated at work again?

Thanks

Background

My small 15-ish employee company has a large legacy codebase written primarily in old Angular.js v1.x.

Those who've had intimate knowledge of the codebase have long departed, and we can't really hire Angular.js v1.x experts in today's tech landscape.

The scale here is around 100k lines of code.

Problems

• Not enough manpower for a total rewrite
• We need to add new features, but work is slow because current engineers are missing key context and have a hard time groking the old code itself

Questions

1. Any tips for navigating a legacy codebase? Often times things like IDE navigation doesn't even work from file to file.
2. Any patterns for migrating away? I've heard of something called a "strangler fig" which seems like a real possibility.

I feel like I am always learning and not delivering as much results as my senior colleagues. How to strike a balance?