How to work without deadlines (self project management)

Software Engineer at Taro Community2 months ago

Recently started a new grad SWE job at a top tech company. Unlike my internships where each ticket had story points and each sprint had total story point targets for each team member, now in this job we don't have that (ie no story point estimate for tasks and no total story points targets for sprints - we don't even have sprints, people just work on tickets and move on to the next).

How do I make sure I am operating at the right speed and not too slow? Do I ask for feedback from my manager 1:1 every week about my performance? I don't want to get an unpleasant surprise at the time of the annual performance review.

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Discussion

(5 comments)

1
Charlie Vuong
•Eng @ Taro
2 months ago
In the beginning, you're probably going to be given less time-critical tasks, so it's a good way for you to learn the codebase and go at a reasonable pace so you can start to calibrate how long it will take for you to do different tasks.

I'm not sure if I would even ask your manager about whether you are going at an appropriate speed. Because, if you are going as fast as you can, what can you do if they say you need to move faster if you are already going at max speed? I would spend the next few weeks orienting yourself around the codebase by fixing as many tickets as you can, so you can get a sense of how to calibrate how long it'll take for you to fix issues.

After a month or two when you are making larger code changes, you can start to let your manager know that "task A is going to take a week because X, Y, and Z need to be done", and then you can gauge whether that's an appropriate amount of time by their response.
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  Software Engineer [OP]
  •Taro Community
  2 months ago
  my initial thought was that having a deadline would push me to work harder with more focus (due to pressure of deadline)
  
  also if my speed is slow even after max focus, i don't mind working overtime for now
  
  that is why i wanted to gauge where i stand currently in terms of speed
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Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
2 months ago
I'm surprised that a top company doesn't have deadlines given the current economic climate.

At the end of the day, deadlines do exist somewhere (usually in the brain of some executive), they just might not be formalized. Your goal here is to formalize them.

You can solve this with some upfront, proactive, and clear communication:

"Hey [manager], what's a good target date for this task? I was thinking 2 weeks is a good deadline but wanted to hear your thoughts."

If your manager is being ultra-nice and giving you an answer like "Oh, just finish it when you finish it", politely refuse that non-answer and push harder. Tell them that you appreciate flexibility but a target date (even if it's sort of conjured up) would be tremendously helpful to give you a forcing function + motivation.
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  Software Engineer [OP]
  •Taro Community
  2 months ago
  so the entire epic does have a deadline. but so many engineers work on an epic - it's more like we collectively as a team need to hit that deadline. It's just that no individual ticket deadlines are there
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  Alex Chiou
  •Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
  2 months ago
  
  so the entire epic does have a deadline. but so many engineers work on an epic - it's more like we collectively as a team need to hit that deadline. It's just that no individual ticket deadlines are there
  
  Okay, this is more of a planning thing for the tech lead then. Having only 1 broad deadline for the entire project is a recipe for disaster.
  
  You should talk to your tech lead and see what sub-milestones make sense. As a new grad who is also new to the company, you will need this support initially. Over time, you will develop this intuition on decomposing + estimating over time.
  
  I highly recommend the code quality course, especially the lessons starting from this one: https://www.jointaro.com/course/level-up-your-code-quality-as-a-software-engineer/break-it-down/