Work-life Balance Q&A and Videos

I was hired as a mid-level engineer, but I'm performing at the level below it. I had about a year and a half of experience coming into my company but didn't get much from it due to multiple re-orgs. In hindsight, I was a poor hire for my role and have felt this way the entire time. I am not interested in the niche and motivation is a struggle at times. I stayed because the team was really strong and I thought I could focus on the coding and grow technically. That was a mistake.

Fast forward a year and a half later (now), my manager tells me informally that my delivery is ok, but the way I go about my work needs improvement and I'm not growing, so I am performing at a level below. I need a lot of help from other engineers. And that I need fewer comments on my diffs and to do more research on problems because I'm not problem-solving well enough to be at my level. He's completely right. The team is full of high-performers and I know that I'm doing poorly by comparison. But I'm already consistently overworking into the evening and weekends.

I'm also hitting the limit with my mental health. I am putting in effort, but am being told it's not enough. For example, I spend some time understanding X and think I understand it, but teammate questions me in a way that makes me apply that knowledge and I realize my understanding is not so good or I did not think about it that way, so I am ashamed because I have spent a lot of time working on the task, but have failed to deep dive into this part. Or my teammate asks me for my thoughts on how to make something better, but nothing really comes to mind. How do I work on this behavior?

Some other questions:

• Is this a sign to leave my team or company? And the profession? Despite my best efforts, I'm disappointing my team and it's taking a toll.
• I haven't been served a PIP yet, but is this a sign that it's coming?
• Naive take, but is it a bad idea/even possible to ask for a downlevel? The reasoning was that I'd rather keep my job than lose it.
• Any advice?

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.

I am the last person who should be complaining right now, but I absolutely hate my job and the tech sector in general right now. I work at Sh*p**y and even though I got promoted, the hr culture has changed to not increase compensation upon promotion. There's a lot of other hr f**kery I am having to deal with besides this.

Clickbait titles on twitter, business Insider posts or any news media article talking about AI replacing software engineers has given me a headache. Like I get that CEOs are using AI as a coin term to jack up stock prices or raise money. I have enough experience to know there won't be a true AI software engineer for a while but it still bothers me somehow because of the uncertainty (media brainwashing).

Overhanging worry of getting PIPed and not being able to find a job, because a lot of my former colleagues who were let go took a full year to find a new gig.

I'm just exhausted from thinking. I'm scared to talk to my bosses because they will always side with senior leadership, and I am exhausted by the rumours that are circulating about Q* and all the other AI domination clickbait posts.

Has anyone been able to learn to defuse from situations like this? I bet 08' was even worse than the current times. How did people deal with job uncertainties then? Really need answers because my productivity at work has gone down the drain.

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"?

Does it get worse as you progress from L3 -> L4 -> L5 -> L6 -> etc? Intuitively that seems like what would happen as your scope grows across promotions: Is there more overtime associated with the more senior levels?

My Role is Senior SRE

I received my second performance review and it came in at a -M which means Sometimes meets expectations. This is my first year in big tech and I'm at a loss for words. I worked 12-hour days since I started. The first 6 months I just winged it and did not realize how strategic and crucial these performance reviews were.

So for my second 6 months, I aligned with my team lead and manager. I executed every project they asked me to and even created some projects to help the entire team. I was led to believe I was doing good work. However, this Tuesday I received the news that my rating is again a -M. They said that they did not put me on a PIP because they saw improvement from the last PR.

They told me the reason was that I am one of 3 Sr. Engineers and that two of them are performing more than I am. Since we are rated on a curve I am last. 9 out of my 10, 360 reviews were positive and an M or above. I have a follow-up meeting next week with my manager to discuss my improvement plan. I also set up a call with my manager's manager for a coaching/mentorship call.
Here are my questions.

• I feel like my manager sees others as more proficient than me. Even though other colleagues tell me I am better than the other senior engineers how can I break out of this perception my manager has?
• How can I avoid a PIP? Our next performance review is in 2-3 months due to some changes they made in the yearly PR schedule. I don't think I can make enough changes during that time.
• What should my approach be towards my manager and his manager?
  • I want to be humble but also direct.
  • I feel I am not being treated fairly but I also think the system may be designed this way. I don't want to appear like I am a victim either.
• I fear that I will get a PIP due to my manager's subjective opinion I will lose my job, my apartment, and I will have lost the last 2 years of working myself to the bone. How can I escape being in this state of survival?

I’m married with two kids. It’s important that I spend time with my family, while also doing well in my career. Do you have thoughts on growing my career without burning the midnight oil?

I’ve been feeling burnt out at my job in the sense of having barely any passion or motivation left for the work. After taking some time off on multiple occasions, I find that I fall back into the same place a couple of weeks into working again. Has anyone experienced this consistent state of feeling burnt out and were you able to overcome it? If so, how did you do it?

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.

It's just my first month and my manager said I had to improve a lot because his expectations for a senior engineer is much higher, not just technically but also behaviourally.

I'm feeling anxious because I was in a pretty laid back company before and the rapid pace of a startup took me off-guard. I'm trying to push through by working longer hours but I don't think I'd be able to reach my manager's expectations.

It's causing me anxiety just by thinking about my job. Is it ok to leave a job even if I don't have anything lined up yet? I'm trying to review to get a new job but the long hours are taking up my personal time. What could be my options?

I'm looking to leave my current team, as I don't find the work to be interesting: I spend ~50% of my time on ops work.

I want to choose the right team that’s interesting to me, but it's tricky as I don’t exactly know what I want to work on. I just know that I want to work on the back-end and on a team where learning opportunities are flexible. During team matching, what kind of things would you look for in a team?

My priorities are as follows:

1. Interesting work
2. Growth opportunities
3. Compensation
4. WLB

What if manager is asking more things that you could accomplish?

What if most of the people accomplish only P1 priorities and do not have time for anything else in the org?

What if there are kids that need more attention and work life balance is not great, how to set strict boundaries and if you are not caring as much about level and total compensation?

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.

I am currently burnt out and looking for ways to take a break.

Looking at Google's generous severance benefits, I had thoughts to inform my manager that I am up for the chopping block if there are any foresight of next round of layoffs. Which I think should be good for the company since I am also helping one motivated Googler to not be laid off in the future.

But then, I am afraid it might get rejected and my manager's relationship with me get strained.

Are there any suggestions on getting severance package while indicating my intent to resign?

Additional context

I am currently not on PIP and is considered excellent performer. I was promoted to L5 in mid 2021

Michael Lin's blog discussed on the "preemptive severance package" which is relevant to what I am hoping to do

I wanted to ask people to how to handle stress at work especially after a company layoff with fewer people around?

Is it a good idea to plan time-off around busy periods at work especially after a tech layoff when workloads may have increased for remaining employees?

Given all of the tech layoff, my company also conducted ~10% layoff earlier this month. I am not directly impacted by the layoff as a Senior SWE. But due to the layoff and reorganization, I found that I have become the official go-to person when it comes to Production system issue for the backend and point of contact when it comes to troubleshooting 3rd party API and production issue triage person.

I just finished my first on-call rotation for production support last week, and it's kind of exhausting when I reported Production Incident that categorized as P1 and P2 incident, which resulted an outage due to 3rd party API. I got a lot questions from Product and Business to get updates on business impacts from this 3rd party API outage issue for the past couple days. In light of this, I found myself really need a break from the exhaust of the work. Any thoughts or suggestions on this?

WLB also means something different to people and therefore I'm curious what the best way is to discover the "truth" of the team you are interviewing into before both applying and joining a company.

For example, when I worked at Amazon, I did not work beyond 40 hours in either of my teams, but the occasional weekend because I was oncall, and this was fine for me personally. At Google Cloud, I was working longer during the weekdays (self-imposed because this was during COVID and I never worked weekends), but other teams at Google have been more relaxed in general.

I've been told Meta, Amazon and a few others have a poor WLB balance, but then I've also spoken to managers (and experienced it myself in the case of Amazon) that this is team dependant and manager dependant. I also assume it varies by your level.

That said, I'm a DE, so likely the stress level overall is also different to a SWE, hence this post.

Asking because I have some experience with it, which you can find below:

• I wasn't truly enjoying the work I was doing in my role from the very beginning. I think the fact that it is customer facing drains me the most and I keep feeling bad that I wasn't doing deep technical work.
• I completely burned myself out last year after joining a high-stakes team with too much ambiguity to deal with being early in my career. Also, my senior colleague left the team so most of the work landed on my shoulders. It was also a lot of the non-technical work I disliked.
• That burnout was the breakpoint of my decision to switch careers to SWE where I can be more hands-on. LeetCode is a grind on its own so this non-stop chase somewhat makes me question the whole field in general, but I'm probably just spoiled with the current opportunities I have.

My manager and I and my teammate have been owning the on-call rotation for the platform for my company's flagship product that we launched recently. The rotation of 2-3 engineers is hectic and overwhelming, and my manager and I have brought up this issue, and finally got the acknowledge from the rest of the organization that more engineers needed to be added into the on-call rotation to form a healthy on-call? Is 8-10 engineer on-call rotation a healthy rotation?

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.