What's been shared here is huge so far. Having respect for others is great. There's also coworkers you can share frustrations with depending and see if there's something more cultural at play. Work with others to make sure that frustrations are addressed privately and bring them up in a public setting as needed for constructive use. I'm shifting into an area where there's a lot of discontent about process, but we started to detract/derail the conversation, so I pulled them aside and said let's handle it privately and bring in others moving forward as needed, so we don't spread the negativity too much. In your case though, a simple disagreement is usually just something easy to resolve, recurring likely meaning something cultural at play. I'm having to work on those as well to make sure that everyone else can work together. Nobody's at fault, sometimes policy, culture, or even different experiences have drastically different impacts on people's mental states and behaviors.

Senior Software Engineer at IBM

Brad Messer

So being at a similar big company I had the same problem because I wanted to learn everything and never shared my troubles with the people around me. When I started to do that, I gained more leverage and I started to understand who can do what and how to not be a mess navigating the political side of work. Show interest, take charge, ask people how they would approach a problem if you're unsure, help others with their problems that you've overcome before, go where you want and build the skills you know will make an impact in your career. Pay attention to delineations, maybe you reach out and make a mistake, maybe a whole team is offboarding and you need to take over their work. Maybe you start asking folks on how you can better advance your career. These should work wonders for you.

What's already been shared here is great and as you've seen some are motivated by different things. Work and money are my top most things and I think you're able to tell who has what motivations already. I'd focus the two interested on money bigger problems in the organization knowing they will wield the power responsibly and then make sure the others still get interesting work to keep them engaged. Now, when it comes to deadlines, always make sure you have hard deadlines and tell the engineers that. This is how you get them to be reasonably motivated. Also keep in mind several realistic targets that I would do with statistical project management before I ever approached the team about this and ever even commit any dates to contract. In a sense, with these resources how likely am I to make the dates given and toy around with that before ever bringing the staff onboard. Once the deadlines are decided though, everyone needs to move in unison and its likely going to be hell for them. Support them in this, take their feedback and adjust the culture as the culture itself of the place is going to be inefficient for the goals you have outlined and so you get into debugging lots of cultural problems too. Along the way, you also have to learn how to help the culture learn to chart course in a very hostile, competitive free market. Here's some books that I've found useful:

Navigating the free market\
Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors

Project Management\
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

Hope this helps!

The prior response does incredibly well to highlight that negotiation process and you can get a sense of how hard a piece of functionality is needed vs how soft it is. Some dates you cannot miss or the company goes kapoot. Some things scope can kinda slip out a bit because if it's going to be shipped in a reasonable amount of time done well, then do it and do it right. The one thing I'd caution is the continuous I'm going to do it right and then slipping into the future. At that point, I'd almost expect a PIP coming unless you have a really good reason.

When you do slip, be respectful to still get it done in reasonable amounts of time. Everyone has to go through grind periods in our life fairly regularly, but what makes it easier is a grind you can enjoy and manage rather than feel anxiety from and just want to find another job immediately. I suppose I'd also look to your and each individual's needs and see. I'm working a bit less right now because I just got off a job where I was recovering from incredibly hardcore mental health struggles and I need the breather room, but I get my work done quick so I still have 25-30 hours a week to fill with much more impactful work while my coworkers done 70 hrs a week (our work is equally challenging, but I'm well beyond super educated in my specialty and they're being put into new areas of learning hence the difference).

Lastly, I just like to attack my day and keep myself educated. This makes everything so much easier as work is just caught up and I can keep my schedules on track meaning my manager's happy. Try it out and just get a sense of your manager. They are great people too and it's really only ever been more fundamental differences in personality that put us at odds.

You've done well to really list the habits of a healthy individual and it's cool that your looking into this. Since the personal wellness aspect has been taken care of, maybe I can help with the business side of things. Knowing where you want to go is huge so you can structure your learning and meet up with new people. This also helps me engage with others around me more respectfully and get my work done quicker which everyone is happy with. Getting up and just attacking my day is something I've also found useful. Get in, get the work done, go home and just enjoy life. Certainly better than alternatives where you get stuck doing something you don't enjoy.

In what sense? Do you know what aspect you would like to focus on? For instance, I really love data science and Machine Learning Engineering meaning I need to know about models serving environments, how to hook those up to data pipelines and the like. I've never had what you had professionally so I am slightly jealous, but maybe we can talk about where you want to be?

You just have to know what's priority and what you're interested in. Other things you have to learn to do what you want. Think about where you want to go, focus just on what you need to get there, and let the rest slide off. I think everyone struggles with this tbh and I'm working with a lot of folks right now so they won't be running off of cliffs anytime soon.

I think that both of these answers are great so far. I've been working with mentees a lot as there is such a plethora of information out there and they're getting hit with it at 70 hrs a week rather than taking it slower and using the 20-30 hrs they would have spent working bootstrapping themselves instead. To aid this, I've cultivated a lot of material I've looked at in my own right and share at a pace they find appropriate. All titles are available and I've also curated a YouTube playlist with a lot of helpful content from 1 hr webinars I've watched along the way. But engaging mentors, building learning roadmaps, picking up bit by bit is a good way to rock this.

I've had this myself too to a point I haven't really gotten to do much coding in the last few months. My job though is to make the team better and to take on the grunt work when necessary to keep everyone helping at a high rate. In my case, people around me are working \~70hr weeks and I'm working \~55 max with a lot of my days finishing up midday really because there is no work to do. I scale through others by asking them to do the hard work I don't know how to do and then I jump in to ease up the pressure on my juniors by spending quality time in the trenches. Once one trench gets cleaned up, then we as a team can be re-deployed to help with other trenches. As stated before, document a lot and keep a long term focus. Focus on teaching them as much as possible and encouraging them to help each other grow, otherwise the situation becomes untenable very quickly and you start getting turnover.