From what I've seen, hiring managers are trying to fill closer to 100% of the reqs on a job posting right now since the market is so flush with talent. That being said, if you follow Rahul's advice and have trouble, it sounds like someone would be missing out on an amazing junior. Keep in touch though as I'm building out a network of entrepreneurs. Right now is a great time to make the jump:

- [Transitioning into Entrepreneurship](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bradmesser_from-worker-to-founder-transitioning-into-activity-7059993342805237761-TG0g?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop)
- [Working through the (e)motions](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bradmesser_from-worker-to-founder-going-through-the-activity-7060650941519130624-S8xw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop)

Senior Software Engineer at IBM

Brad Messer

If I'm to be fully honest with you, rarely is something ever the perfect mental model we have in our heads, but we strive towards it the best we can and unfortunately it rarely happens at the pace we want with the people around us. Even if we have the perfect set of rewards in place and no matter how close we get, people very well may still let you down.

I'd get a sense to a point that it is still just how people live their lives and its about finding a group of people you can reasonably accept without getting angry or losing hope with.

Digging into the particulars of this trouble, I had a lead at one point that was decently good at filling out tickets, but there was a bit of information I had to infer still because of the amount of time they had available. I found it upsetting because the ticket wasn't filled out like the promise should have been, but they said I needed to be more proactive and make those decisions myself.

Sometimes too these differences in expected nuances can lead to trouble, but accepting them and just moving through it with grace can make you more likeable since you aren't being nitpicky about everything.

This is one of the small qualities of life people will bring up to you in just normal conversation, but not one you are ever necessarily told.

I'd just keep informed of a lot of the different tools out there the best you can. You can always come across the gem and just bring it into your workflow as long as legal concerns allow for you to, but for you to predict the future is exhausting and will likely end in burnout.

I really like what's been provided already. For myself, I've certainly always had issues of other engineers time at one point or another, but I'm going into founding of my own company, so this becomes less of an issue for me personally. 

I usually keep most of my mentees self-sustaining to the point where they don't need me and if anything that's what a good mentor should do. What I do do for them though is provide them the resources I want them to learn from to close gaps in their knowledge so they can be a better partner to me.

I've definitely seen varying amounts of uptake on what I provide and I really like to work with the folks who put in the large amount of work to close the gap. What's 3 days spent reading the 7th Edition Kurose and Ross networking book if you work heavily in an area that utilizes it? Furthermore, it saves the friction on my schedule when I have to dive in and help. Not that I won't help, but I'm not the one with the knowledge gap.

In your case, I'm not sure I'd really enjoy walking them through the details of a high level design to a super meticulous degree. I usually put an architecture diagram in mural, put all relevant details to explain and complete the tasks, and then divide out the work into stories we can tackle in serial or in parallel. Keeping the onus of whose knowledge needs to develop to complete the task I think can make them more independent.

This one is particularly hard as they can seem to even try to hold out hope that having you in the chair is better than having no one there at all. I was very proactive 2 months into my new role telling them it wasn't working out for me and there was a general dismissal of the situation. 2 months and a low performance discussion later, I'm resigning to start my own startup where my skills align with the job description. What I'm trying to say is realistically, even the best folks get put in unavoidable situations unfortunately.

@Kuan Peng Thanks for verifying just how much this has been shown and spread throughout industry. Some of the teams I were on were operated differently and this definitely shows how much I really enjoy small PRs. Thanks for sharing!

I'd say it's on a person to person basis really. I just like to move fast and get stuff done and sitting around while waiting for others to answer in the good ole stop-go fashion of the corporate world is a great way to not make deadlines achievable at all. Adding in the I've got other things to do, work that really takes not long to do without comments comes out to being 1-1.5 months before all the comments have been addressed even though I did my part in about 1 week.

That being said, I always tackle it so that PR1 becomes the basis for PR2 and so on as shown in the article and will merge PR1 into the main branch or target branch instead of doing the backwards cascading integration into PR1. Keep an eye on what is happening around you though and note what the most important work you should be focusing on is. I used this to great effect while in a development job, but got into a SRE job that just doesn't fit my personality and has me using my time poorly relative to coworkers. It is all about context.

If this project has been attempted a few times and been canned, chances are there's real business impact from collaborating on and delivering this item. The biggest thing I can recommend is to have a meeting and ask them but to also think about it in terms of a holistic tech picture. How does what they need serve to where we want to get.

Creating and maintaining confidence in a project is partially a matter of how much depth an audience has in a specific knowledge area and how well they know it. For example, I can communicate really novel AI designs since I have deep expertise in ML/AI models and have gained a lot of respect from building that knowledge out and sharing it with everyone. When I go to work, I can be like we can do this novel thing, it's really easy, let me show you how etc and then you implement it and you're done. Instance confidence. Furthermore, keeping them in the loop during the execution of the project and having broken it down into something that multiple teams can work on is also a great help. People who are skilled in servers for instance aren't always the best developers, but you might need a lot of developers for implementing the in-depth code and then higher level folks maybe one or two people for setting up an environment that can run that in production. It all depends on what you're interested in though and what you want to be an expert in, but always plan for an appropriate sized team.

Maybe establish partnerships with neighboring companies interested in sharing and see what good work comes of it. You never know what expertise can be brought to a problem unless you feel comfortable sharing it. The more the better to a point in my opinion.

This makes sense and is partially an outcome of being in a world where we keep things small and maintainable, but need to map out ideas into multiple different stories and work with others to get them complete. When I work on PRs like this, I would put the first one out for review and leave it in the feedback column and then branch off of it and get started on part 2 while the first one is still being worked on. Doing something like this, I can complete an epic's worth of work in about a week, but still have the review process take \~1 month total by the time people come in, leave comments, we have the back and forth ideas and more. It can be frustrating, but as long as everyone in the team is cool with it, you shouldn't have a problem. When the review finally gets merged, then just pull down main and merge it into the new feature branch. Ok, you will have to solve a lot of merge conflicts, but that at most should take 30 mins - 1hr. Some people might take longer since they can get intimidated by the diffs. Just focus on processing the work and keeping everything small. Your coworkers will thank you!

Both answers have provided good context and I'd like to get my own thoughts in as well. There's so much context around it like legal issues about attributable AI that things can get murky quickly. That being said, though, I'm absolutely enchanted by these tools and would use them in my work if allowed. Remember you need to be a good partner to them though and understand what they give you as that is your reputation on the line when something goes wrong. Similarly, you should also know how to test code well and make sure any tests generated are per an appropriate standard. As long as you can do these things though, have fun. These are the ways of the future and they are going to make our lives so much quicker. Also consider that not every task you want to do necessarily has even an according domain specific model for that yet. I say that as I'm going to be getting into some really advanced domain specific modelling soon and it is going to be fun. That being said, you have to see how typical or atypical your use case is and what you can do to make life easy. Hope this helps!

What Alex and Rahul have mentioned here has certainly been a good add. I just want everyone involved to be happy and really successful. If you can take work off my plate that is always really helpful. If you can keep project timelines going and make the business successful then all better. Now if you have fun, accomplish your dreams, and help others do the same, then you're all good to go. Good luck to you and I'm always game to network if you want to reach out.

Everything that has been said here is of course good and it really depends on how senior you are as well within the job of interest. 0 other context, I'd be trusting the person with 20 years of experience more than I would trust someone with 0 years of experience, but there are a lot of other factors that start to play into it. As a case study, I was hired recently into a new job that sounded great on the surface but turned out very differently after sitting in it for a few months (i.e. It wasn't what it was nearly advertised). Overall, it just made me realize I needed to try a different path. There's more to the story, but that's for another time to tell. Nobody is at fault though.

From what I'm seeing, I think you're doing well and now the problem is being in a team of people who may be working constant crazy hours vs the on occasion crazy hours. Unfortunately, it is true that the more hours you put in the more work you get done, but there is obviously a limit to what can or should be done. I'm in a position myself right now where I just don't enjoy the work being given to me and need to find something else to do. As a reminder, level of ambiguity is relative to how much knowledge you have in the area. I don't like pulling the long hours people like your teammates like pulling as it implies there's just an inefficiency in how the work is being done and you should take some time for higher leverage learning to make the process of the main work go a lot quicker. Some folks may not agree with me, but then its their prerogative to work those crazy weeks while I continuously leave early and enjoy my evenings.

I'd really recommend keeping in regular touch with the people who oversee you and make sure you're effectively contributing to the team. Like already mentioned, interns aren't expected to do much heavy lifting, but do even better than you did last year and see how it comes out. Even better if you can use the languages you're using more on a day to day basis and see where that lands you.

In my own right, I focus mostly on the quality of learning and the projects that I'm going to take on. Especially you with Meta or myself with IBM, you get the brand recognition, but as mentioned there are numerous other vectors.

There can be soft validators like how proud would you be to tell people about what you do if you could. What would your inner narrative be about yourself in that position. 

What's the chance of maximizing upside in a position, for me technical work without travel, and how does that feed into your ability to prepare for your next position. Will you be stronger for it or weaker for it?

That is certainly a miserable feeling and all jobs can have busy patches at one point or another. One thing that worries me is that they are working on weekends needlessly with no context whatsoever. That can happen even as we start to pick up new roles, but with the whole team doing it, it suggests they're really scared about the macroeconomic effects present in the current economy and may be overcompensating which isn't good and impacting their physical health which certainly isn't good. For you, you should have the option to handle employment as you see fit. If the current team isn't your cup of tea, consider making your own team. If you're going to be working the long hours, you might as well make more money doing something you love.

What's been highlighted really well is the joy of teaching and how you can help others, but honestly it doesn't always have to be fully at the expense of your own time or immediate deliverables. Everything you deliver on has an enterprise-wide impact, otherwise there's no point in doing the work. What's not being mentioned is how to make that time and what you can do with the time that's freed up to move others along a good path.

Everything I work on is a group project and to give you a sense, I'm focusing on event management right now. I committed to modernizing things one way and didn't want to bother people at the time since they were more focused than I on picking up some new knowledge. I cut one way that while nice, might have incurred some tech debt for the project since the OS natively supports conversion to another format that's easier to handle. My mistake early on cost me maybe 20hrs of work.

Ok, that stinks, but now I know. Before I made the same mistake and even dedicated time to fix it and move to the better supported method, I asked a coworker who better understood the ancillary tech than I did how to handle things and we think cutting a different way might be able to handle easier and bring under automation, but now I'm purposefully waiting to execute on certain aspects of the project until the team gets a couple meetings under their belt and to see what their preferences are, otherwise more work = more tech debt without knowing preferences.

By the way, the 2hrs that I would've spent cleaning things up, migrating, etc, I am now spending here with you in part writing this because other folks I need to work with on high impact work are tied up until next week. Most important thing, in this job role, I don't go over 40 hrs of week, though of course I'm not counting the \~1800hrs of education I did on my own time in the last couple years before coming into this job role, that makes everything so much easier. Please forgive the flexing. It's more just trying to say that having fine-grained controls over all aspects of your life and work and turning the dial up and down as appropriate will make your life so much easier. Combine with becoming an expert in a specific technology or set of technologies you really enjoy and your utility, leverage will go through the roof. All's fair love and war. Make sure you contribute enough hands-on to be of use in the problem solving process, contribute your fair share of design points, and don't necessarily try to know everything and you should be on the right way to becoming an expert people can rely on.

1. I'd be asking how comfortable do you feel with the technology? Can you eat, breathe, and sleep it? Can you come up with creative ideas on the fly where others are like "Oh wow, they're really smart"? Could I put you in situations with absolutely no design whatsoever and have you come up with a prototype architecture we can scale to production usage? It sounds like you're already on your way there, but I recommend finding one who casts a vision you really feel inspired by and would love to have on your resume.
2. Luckily there's help to that at each stage in the process and it really depends on where your funding comes from. Incubators and accelerators can be incredibly helpful regardless and pair you up with a good amount of people in the short term to learn a good amount. Shortening the workday when particularly stuck and deep-diving on a topic could really help blow the doors open on an otherwise hard to achieve problem. At any stage of the process too, any founder should have a good amount of funding sitting around with a plan to scale up the business. If you continually get stuck, it could mean it is time to go and ask for help in scaling the business.

I think that's the trouble with the professional life for the most part. Professional growth has no road map, no keeping score, no trophies, and even mentors might not have as deep knowledge as you might expect. Coworkers or friends will each have their opinions for you too and it's up to you to listen or ignore as appropriate. Envision what you really want and have longed for. I'm meant to be a C-level executive and data scientist in my own career and I'm meant to establish philanthropic pipelines that arise from my work to keep people safe long after I'm gone. Listen to that internal hum and let it drive you. I know when I didn't I hit the worst patches of my life.

Based on what Rahul and Alex have said, I can also better highlight what led to me turning down a few offers or how solid offers turned into exploding offers. During my last job search a few months back, I had the option of downshifting to entry-level in a startup since I was only mid doing exactly what I wanted to do, but they didn't know how to do microservice architectures well, so I said no to a second interview. I interviewed at senior at a national lab and the interviewer felt very stiff, again not something that's going to work for me even if it was something I wanted to do. A 3rd one was a good buy, but data science automation senior at a startup doing automation only no modelling, and even then the modelling work was only basic statistics when I can work in research level AI. I talked back and forth a bit and we just weren't a match for each other. Once you start to get these kinds of experiences you get a sense of how flexible someone is. Assume that tech stacks shown in a job ad are likely set in stone and there's not much you can do in the short term to change it, even if you know something better. It was also a great lesson to me in being picky within reason and it set me on a better life path than had I not been picky.

Just to add to Rahul's thoughts here, it isn't fully just about respect and ability, but also because you need train others up to your level as well. Keep in mind there are managers with really solid technical backing and managers with really bad technical backing and its pretty easy to tell them apart, hence why you want to have the better technical backing going in. 

In the current US economy, I'd be concerned about making the switch and making sure there's a job if things go south, so what I did in my personal work experience is getting myself up to speed with obvious business learning in my free time and then stay as a very solid technical contributor.

I think from what I've seen is being an experienced mid-level with probably 5-6 years of experience, but I've certainly seen former interns get to engineering manager in 2-3 years after their time to us without any context of the intermediary accomplishments.

There's a lot of thoughts that go into something like this:

1. What are you working on?
2. How much do you know about the topic?
3. What are the deadlines?
4. How much research have you put into understanding what's going on before getting another person's input?
5. Have your project partners been contributing their fair share to project completion?
6. Was anything unclear in the initial communication?

and even more. I have people reach out to me about all manner of items and personally I don't really make a big deal about it. If I think something is a bit overkill, I let them know in a friendly manner and we move on. If I think there needs to be more work, I let them know too. The whole just get it perfect isn't realistic. Just work with and enjoy each other's company and then move on.

I'd also review your commitments to the business and any implied commitments as well because how the business interprets the contract is just as important as the wording of the contract itself. In other words, don't upset the 600lb gorilla in the room.

The thing I'm particularly focused on is you've changed companies and that the burnout has followed you. What I would focus on and have seen in my own teammates is that they try to do too much. As part of our responsibilities to the business, we have to understand the topmost priorities and focus solely on those. If there's still more than 50-60 hrs a week, then you probably also need to automate more processes within the job to make the commitments to the business more easily managed. In my own job, we're having to take on entire initiatives to get things up to par and I want to ensure you're being properly taken care of.

@Xue Ha That is such a great response. We'll always make mistakes but it is important to treat this as a learning process and move on. Lots of different variables will come into play to make unique situations and we always want to act in healthiest manner possible. I've also been in situations where I was forced to make a decision on mine own since I wasn't getting and would never get the face time needed to help resolve the issue because of how peers were spending their time. It really stinks, but I'm glad to not be around those folks anymore and that I can focus on problems that are just more interesting overall.

It seems you've gotten the infamous non-specific growth feedback. When you get something like this, it helps to dig into it more and understand what's going on behind those thoughts. It seems like you're technical, but that all those beautiful thoughts aren't making their way across to the recruiter. I'd just take a good look at your own knowledge, maybe pay attention to what you're getting feedback in your PR reviews and I think you'll be fine.

How novel can you be relative to your peers while solving problems? In my latest job, I'm wanting to revamp everything after \~1800 hrs of study and I'm largely in charge of a number of large-scale initiatives whereas some teammates might only be in charge of epics. That being said, get a sense of how often your coworkers defer to your knowledge in a meeting and then tip that in your favor by focusing in on areas of interest. I do high-end AI/ML, software development, DevOps, and business C-exec level stuff and that's all I'm good at, very little more if you count personal hobbies and trust me it shows in personal life. Build more knowledge in whatever interests you and build out your 10,000 hrs of learning. Remember only your own effort limits you from becoming as good as you want. Just didn't change or do lateral moves too much because you kill forward progress. Hope this helps!

I'm really sorry this happened to you and it has to be so difficult for you like this. Can you tell us anything about what happened? I've seen some things happen like this where some was out for vacation, forgot to reset the password on a critical build system, and a whole org couldn't ship product for a week while they were out. I think set backs like this are difficult, but it would help you to understand what gaps in knowledge you have and break through those brick walls hard. I did that in my career multiple times and I never regret learning too much as it made me such a better engineer and teammate. Right now, it's up to you to prove to everyone it won't happen again, but I would go overboard and really lay it on thick so they truly realize and see that commitment. Might be a bit overboard, but it certainly can't hurt.

Even better is to not just future proof yourself but others around you as well. I'm gonna help some other folks onboard with a modern devops solution they don't really know the tech behind and that's ok. We're just there to support each other and we move through it.

One thing I'm gonna ask is do you have a sense of which systems are more important than others? Do you know what should be a page? Do you know what can be left aside etc? These are questions you should be asking yourself when dealing with pages and not having enough bandwith. I'm taking over for a job right now where I literally got 40 pages just this past weekend and the team we're taking over for would just work all weekend. I'm not accepting of that and am helping the team drive down man-hours partially by finding things we can address and doing root-cause analysis and then also finding deficiencies in the product itself and working with all the other teams whose products we use to drive beneficial outcomes reducing man-hours on our side. This is all important for reducing working hours and ensuring partner teams are acting at top efficiency.

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.

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](https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining-Performance/dp/0684841460)
- [Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors](https://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Industries-Competitors/dp/0684841487)

### Project Management

- [How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business](https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Business/dp/1118539273)

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.