Staff Software Engineer [Lead MTS] at Salesforce

It's been hard for me to draw the line between work and life with their current involvement. Here's some examples:
1. They had a meeting where staff engineers (myself included) had to review a junior engineer's code.
2. They ping me at odd hours, sometimes after midnight.

I also have calls with a team in a very time zone, stretching out my workday and making it start pretty early and end pretty late. Any ideas on how I can improve this situation?

How to deal with a micromanaging senior manager?

There's too much work on my plate, which is made worse by the nature of our team's product:
1. It's a black box, so it's hard to understand. There are very few Staff+ level engineers on my team to unravel this.
2. I spend a lot of time on proof of concept projects instead of core execution work.
3. The level of expectations are seemingly increasing every day.

What can I do to make things more doable?

How can I reduce my overwhelming workload?

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?

How can I pursue growth while maintaining work-life balance?

Knowing that, how should I tailor my career path - What companies should I work for and what skills should I get to set myself up for success against this goal? Should I continue working at Salesforce or should I go work for a different company?

One of my dreams is to start my own venture someday. How do I tailor my career accordingly?

I have realized that I need a very high level overview of the current system and what other systems it communicates with. I have no idea on how to do it; I'm currently planning to have a meeting with my EM.

I have access to the Quip, Google Drive, and some brown bag sessions. I have watched a few of them, but it all seems very fragmented. After I figure all this out, I plan to create a doc which can help others better in the future.

I'm trying to get a high-level overview of my team's current system, and I have no idea on how to do it.

I am the only experienced Full Stack developer in the team and I felt that the management got a bit excited when they found out. For the first week I was asked to represent my team to the UI review committee to get the UI approval, I had little or no background of the feature but it was kind of rushed out.

Second week, I was told to write the design document of a feature which I was not aware of. I started digging deeper into it, but after 3-4 days I was told there is some other team who is working on something similar so I should stop working on it.

Third week, I was told to again start working on it but then was told to put it on hold. Within the same week I was also told to write the Engineering document for the FE development for the team, this was a bit surprising for me seeing there is almost everything custom at SF, I felt I needed some time to understand the ecosystem, it is the work in progress.

One of the projects I’m leading has a lot of thrash. How can I smoothen execution on future work?

I'm a relatively new engineer at Salesforce (been here just ~4 months), and I'm having trouble clearly understanding my expectations.

What's the ideal ramp-up/onboarding strategy for a Staff engineer at a Big Tech company like Salesforce; in particular, what should the first 3-6 months look like? Are there any specific artifacts you would expect such an engineer to have produced during this time?

For a Staff engineer at a Big Tech company, what should their first 3-6 months look like?

I was assigned a P1 bug, and when I started to dig deeper into it, I found out that actual code was written by some other team and we have just used that code/object to build a small feature. I got a bit lucky that someone in my team told that the team ‘A’ owns that code/object. I was given a POC, but it turns out that they have left that team. I would like to have a POC to close out this bug.

For additional context: It is still not clear if it's the feature or the bug that's broken, that’s why we need to get clarification from the other team. Here's a high-level example to make things more clear: There is an object named "Product" which is a generic one, team ‘A’ built another object called "Product Category", and we added a field to that object. Now unless I ask some senior folks in my team it is really hard to understand who owns "Product Category".

Given all these unknowns, how can I navigate this situation and make sure this bug is resolved properly?

I'm trying to fix a P1 bug, but some relevant code is owned by another team. Unsure about ownership and how to proceed.

I learned that my whole team is kind of new (Salesforce acquired this product), and they have just started contributing to the core platform. There are currently a lot of approvals necessary to merge front-end code into the system. This is rough as there's many epics connected to front-end work, and there is not a single senior person in the team which can take charge of looking into the high level architecture, following best practices, and doing better planning to release the code to prod.

I am the only full-stack Staff engineer here, and this is why my EM wants me to create a master front-end tech spec for the team. As an example of something this doc can cover: At Salesforce, there are multiple ways to communicate with the back-end API, each of which has their pros and cons but that information is scattered - We can consolidate that info into this doc.

Given that I haven't written any front-end code here at Salesforce, this task seems hard and I'm unsure how to do this without looking stupid.

I need to write a front-end tech spec but have no front-end experience here. How can I do this without looking stupid?

At a previous company, a friend had an exceptional mentor who helped him climb from mid-level to senior engineer in 1.5 years. I’ve struggled to find a mentor of similar caliber. What advice do you have for finding a good mentor?

How do I find a good mentor at my company to help me level up faster?

For example, this week I was told to work on adding a field to some legacy entity which is not recommended (i.e. you need to have a solid business justification). The whole process is very lengthy, requiring many layers of approval just for this single field change. How can I find the scope appropriate to my level?

Even as a staff engineer, I own just a tiny piece of the system. How can I find additional scope to grow?

Before I was at Amazon in Cambridge, England. I came to enjoy the quality of life there, but recent changes made me switch to Salesforce in India. The work-life balance here is good, but even as a staff engineer, I’m having trouble finding scope - I own just a small piece of the overall system my team’s responsible for.

I was able to recently get an offer from Spotify for a UK office, which expires in a month. However, it’s for Software Engineer 2, a level below their senior level. This isn’t ideal as one of my goals is to be a Staff engineer at a reputable company.

Should I stay at Salesforce where I’m already a Staff level and have solid work-life balance or move back to the UK to work for Spotify?

Should I stay at Salesforce India as a staff engineer or move back to the UK to be a Software Engineer 2 (mid-level) at Spotify?

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and more.

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Staff Software Engineer [Lead MTS]

I'm sorry to hear this - It's always a really bad feeling when you simply have way too much to do. First, I recommend checking out [this very similar Q&A](https://link.jointaro.com/xPAfJeP9aej218g16) from another senior+ engineer who is feeling overwhelmed.

That being said, here's some thoughts from me:
- **Can you check in with the other senior/staff engineers?** - I wonder if they're doing okay or in a similar situation. If they're also having trouble, that's something you can bring as a greater feedback to your manager. If they have figured something out to manage everything smoothly, you can learn from them.
- **Is it possible to reduce the proof of concept (POC) work?** -The point of POCs is that they're a way to quickly vet a full-on product/feature idea. Here are some questions I have about your current situation:
  - Can you cut more corners with the POC work so they're faster?
  - Why aren't the POCs translating to core project work?
  - Is it possible to just stop doing them as they seem to be low impact?
- **Can we prioritize away some of your tasks?** - An exercise I regularly did with my manager was write down everything on my plate and stack rank them by importance. From there, we would agree on what I could deprioritize (i.e. ignore for now) and what couldn't be dropped. This conversation should involve a honest conversation about work-life balance.

I also recommend [this Q&A about dealing with pressure at work](https://link.jointaro.com/c38NW8tEG9geQJ8L8).

Lastly, as mentioned in the first Q&A I linked, no job is worth your mental health and well-being overall. If your manager isn't supportive and you aren't able to correct this situation soon (within 1 month), start looking for outside opportunities aggressively and maybe just leave the company without an offer in hand.

Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal

Alex Chiou

Staff engineers are extremely vital to any engineering team, viewing the landscape from the overall team charter level instead of individual projects.

Work-life balance (WLB) is the state of equilibrium where a person equally prioritizes the demands of one's career and the demands of one's personal life. Having too many responsibilities at work is the primary cause of poor WLB.

How can I reduce my overwhelming workload?

Salesforce

Discussion

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