Editor's Choice Q&A and Videos

I work with a team of 5 engineers amongst whom two are in my timezone. They always work overtime, work over weekends. They dont necessarily create a bigger impact but they are constantly posting on team chat groups about minor issues that they have seen and resolve it over the weekends. And stay late evenings and very late nights talking to the other team members. They spend a great deal of time obsessing over minor details like naming convention, doing repeated tasks.

I cannot keep up with this culture. I would actually like to have a personal life and spend some free time during the week working on side projects or learning something. At some point the opportunities do go to the people who have the most visibility right, no matter how mundane the work they do is? How do I navigate this? I would like to maintain a good reputation and work on interesting things. But I feel like I may be overlooked for promotions due to this. Any advice for me?

Is sprint planning and agile not a thing at meta? I’m doing a lot of research since I’m trying to see how it’s like as I’m spending time leetcoding and if the vibes there are it’s on you to plan your projects and set a timeline then sprint planning would actually make the engineers not excel in independent planning?

And it seems like it’s against good e4 performance to be prompted to set your deliverables at the end of the sprint? Just not sure how agile is used cuz if it’s on everyone to figure out how to project manage on their own then what’s the point of agile?

I am curious if there are any strategies or techniques for better problem understanding. Personally, I struggle with comprehending problems, whether they are coding or business related. I often need to read through the problem multiple times to fully understand it, which may be due to my attention span. I sometimes feel stupid, but I am confident that there are techniques I can learn to improve my understanding of problems without belittling myself.

I'm ambivalent about attending Taro Networking events. On the one hand, the people I meet there are so talented and nice! On the other hand, what am I really getting by meeting them?

Now, I know I just said something extremely transactional. That I don't seem to "get" anything from meeting people. But let's continue this line of thinking for a bit. In my mind, going to a networking event can get you 3 things:

1. potential job referrals

2. potential partners for side-projects and maybe even a startup (which can be considered a kind of job referral)

3. friends/social-contact

Let's assume that I'm not looking for friends, so only the first 2 are in play.

What should I be doing while networking? What happens is I tell them about what I do - my role, company, stack - they do the same, we'll talk about the industry for a bit, and that's that. It seems to me like I'm not getting much out of it, probably because I'm doing it all wrong.

Here's an excerpt from an email from a Data influencer I follow who makes a similar point:

Traditional networking is like a relic of the past for back when we didn't rely on the internet.

Back then, people only recommended and worked with those they'd met in person.

But in our digital age?

We can instantly find and judge coders, designers, data experts, and marketers online based on their LinkedIn & portfolio sites. 

So, here's an alternative to traditional networking... 

**Build things that matter. 

For example, let's say you wanted to break into genAI, or land an e-commerce job at Amazon, or work in ad-tech at Facebook or Google.

To impress hiring managers and recruiters at these FAANG companies, you could build an AI tool for to help retailers advertise more efficiently.

So his point is to build stuff and use that as the fodder for networking. I'm inclined to agree, since personally, my side-project cupboard is bare. I could be falling into the trap of thinking that I can/should only network once I've reached a threshold of building however.

So to sum this up, how do you balance networking vs. building and can you expand on the relationship between them?

Thanks!

I'm working on my side project. A web app.

I know a little of html and css just the basics but now I want to extend my app and make it more visually attractive and I noticed I went to Udemy to look for Modern CSS course etc.

It will take me 20+ hours just to know what to do plus the time I take doing the work.

This approach is not working for me and not gonna finish the project by the deadline I set myself.

What are your thoughts? How you learn something while applying it at the same time?