Productivity Q&A and Videos

hi,

I just started. I've never been at a company this big. I have worked at a 1000 person place before it shrunk (it grew from 3-500 while I was there) and 65 and 500 person shops.

How do you suggest I ramp up? It's so many people and so many layers of code and tech. I have a good amount of experience in data/ml and also eng. I don't think I'm a 10x engineer but I am pretty proficient at getting things done.

What should my plan be even with holiday slow down coming? People are super nice and I don't feel crazy pressure to ship something rn but I put a lot of pressure on myself and want to do well.

I also know code quality is even more important at bigger companies trying to deal with scale. How do I make sure I can keep up?

My Role is Senior SRE

I received my second performance review and it came in at a -M which means Sometimes meets expectations. This is my first year in big tech and I'm at a loss for words. I worked 12-hour days since I started. The first 6 months I just winged it and did not realize how strategic and crucial these performance reviews were.

So for my second 6 months, I aligned with my team lead and manager. I executed every project they asked me to and even created some projects to help the entire team. I was led to believe I was doing good work. However, this Tuesday I received the news that my rating is again a -M. They said that they did not put me on a PIP because they saw improvement from the last PR.

They told me the reason was that I am one of 3 Sr. Engineers and that two of them are performing more than I am. Since we are rated on a curve I am last. 9 out of my 10, 360 reviews were positive and an M or above. I have a follow-up meeting next week with my manager to discuss my improvement plan. I also set up a call with my manager's manager for a coaching/mentorship call.
Here are my questions.

• I feel like my manager sees others as more proficient than me. Even though other colleagues tell me I am better than the other senior engineers how can I break out of this perception my manager has?
• How can I avoid a PIP? Our next performance review is in 2-3 months due to some changes they made in the yearly PR schedule. I don't think I can make enough changes during that time.
• What should my approach be towards my manager and his manager?
  • I want to be humble but also direct.
  • I feel I am not being treated fairly but I also think the system may be designed this way. I don't want to appear like I am a victim either.
• I fear that I will get a PIP due to my manager's subjective opinion I will lose my job, my apartment, and I will have lost the last 2 years of working myself to the bone. How can I escape being in this state of survival?

Every time I'm assigned to a new ticket. I feel really anxious and afraid of asking questions because I don't know anything about it.

This led to procrastinating and making zero progress during 2 - 3 days.

Has someone else experienced this? How did you overcome it?

At times, we face tight deadlines which I believe are challenging to meet. Despite my reservations about the feasibility of such timelines, my fellow engineer peers often express confidence in meeting them, though history has shown they're frequently mistaken. When I voice my concerns, the project managers claim that delivery is non-negotiable, and everyone in the room goes silent. I've suggested prioritizing essential features for the immediate deadline and planning for a subsequent delivery for the rest, but my ideas are usually ignored. Despite not being in a lead role, it's disheartening to later hear about our inconsistent delivery timelines from my manager when I receive performance feedback. How should I navigate these situations? It's frustrating to be the only one on my team who ever expresses these thoughts as I always appear as the "pessimistic" engineer. I just try to voice concerns to make more reliable deliveries. What should I do in these situations?

Hi,

I often hear from here that you should strive to land code as fast as possible to make a meaningful impact and get feedback from your users. I follow this mantra pretty closely as I see those story points as free baskets that make my team look good (because objectively, we're getting stuff done), but it seems many engineers don't subscribe to this philosophy. Sometimes, I see PRs that have been QA'd and approved linger around for days to weeks... It feels like a problem, but it also feels like I'm the only one who brings it up. What is the best course of action?

Can I do well at Job and interview prep simultaneously? Would be interested to hear stories from people and strategies employed.

During session, Rahul mentioned only a few projects are important. I would love to get some concrete examples from Rahul or others on what that looks like. This is my very first question that I am posting in Taro forum. Thank you for the encouragement Alex. Looking forward to everyone's answers.

I just started my software engineer journey and have a typical 9 - 6 working schedule. I feel like the time is getting so limited after I get back home. My goal is to keep some personal time for learning and personal projects every day but still achieve a good balance.

Genuinely look for time management or scheduling advice for newbies in the industry. Thanks a lot!

Hi everyone, I work on Android and currently my team isn't having a lot of OKR work, at least Android-specific. This means I got some time to understand the system better and improve my craftsmanship.

What could I pick up now which will help me in career growth and better understanding of the system? As of now, I am writing a couple of lint rules. I also tried exploring few other repos but there are just too many to explore in-depth.

A year back I joined a Big Tech company as a mid-level software engineer. I had 5 years of work experience mostly in not-so-famous startups and I joined a large tech company after doing my masters.

It's been a year since I joined but I regularly feel like I don't belong here. I go through alternating waves of confidence and self-doubt. When I am not able to debug simple issues in a new microservice, I feel dumb. I feel like the senior devs on my team are just able to solve everything and I am still struggling after a year. I have been through a round of layoffs and re-org and am not sure about the kind of work I will be doing in the future.

I want to be promoted to senior engineer level but constantly get feedback that I am not assertive, opinionated, and take more time than usual to complete ambiguous tasks. I see everyone getting promoted around me and I don't understand why I can't seem to be improving. I am very motivated and willing to slog hard, but it seems like I simply don't get it or am not smart enough. Everyone around me just feels smarter and more experienced.

I feel like moving to a smaller company with not-so-high coding standards and ditching big tech because it will be more up my forte. I am aware that I won't grow there. It just feels frustrating to be stuck at a junior-mid level, 7 years after my bachelor's. But I also know I am not at that level yet.

Any advice on how to go through this problem to the other side will be lovely.

This is not a typical question for Taro community, but l'm here to vent, and looking for honest advice. I'm a working mother at one of MAANG companies. I am a senior engineer, and currently working in a very competitive team that has very poor work life balance. I love my project and l've been getting good ratings so far and everyone is happy with my performance whether it's my manager, TL, DS, PM or XFN partners, according to their feedback for me during PSC.

However, I've been mentally stressed for months now about meeting the expectations and finishing my work while also meeting my kids expectations and having to deal with their emotions and other stuff, taking them to activities and playdates, ... etc and I don't get much help from my husband due to his larger responsibilities at work. I don't Iike to be an average engineer, as l've been used to excelling in my studies and work, it's a mental thing, perfectionism I believe. Should I just quit my job and look for a more relaxed one, if it exists? I’m at a good point in my career now and have already built very good relationships with everyone, and I’m afraid if I will regret this decision later if I don’t find a good alternative.

How to effectively manage work pressure while dealing with health issues? I have taken steps to reduce my work velocity in order to prioritize my health, which was agreed upon with my manager.

However, one of the leads continues to place significant work pressure on me, despite my direct communication about the situation. It is disheartening to experience this situation, especially considering that I received a top rating after my first year at the company. Is it common to encounter such challenges in enterprise companies, even as a high-performing employee? Unfortunately, the senior leadership team has not taken sufficient actions to address this problem.

Additionally, as I am currently on a visa, changing jobs or switching teams is not an option for me at this point. I would greatly appreciate any guidance on how to handle this situation effectively.

I’ve been a senior FEE at Amazon for almost a year now, and I’m still figuring out time management.

Sometimes I get overly involved in others’ tasks, or have too many meetings, or get overwhelmed by all the new campaigns and estimation requests constantly coming through the door while we’re in the middle of meeting deadlines.

How do senior FAANG engineers balance their priorities without overworking or burning out?

P.S. it’d be amazing if Taro can get Steve Huynh (PE at Amazon) to talk about this topic in detail.

I'm a new people manager - previously I was an IC. I understand that I am now equally responsible for the helping the team deliver business goals and promote people's well being and growth.

How do you balance your time and figure out what's most important to focus your time and energy on? How do you spend your focus time you do have?

I am on a tight deadline to deliver an impactful and complex feature. Whenever I send my PR out for review, my lead takes at least 2-3 days to start reviewing the code. Then, there are either a lot of non actionable comments or feedback on tests. So I started sending out a test plan in advance which also receives a lot of feedback. When I turnaround with a refined PR, the lead again takes 2-3 days for a review. I am worried that there are too many iterations for a simple PR and I am chasing the lead for reviews. When I hinted about the review taking time, I got a response that the code shouldn’t have had so many flaws to begin with. The code doesn’t have bugs, he was nit picking on unit tests that could be refactored for better maintainability. I agree, but should that be a show stopper?

I had my code reviewed by a peer and received feedback that there are no blocking changes and the code is mergeable. For a complex feature, I expected 1-2 iterations but each iteration is draining and am starting to wonder if I am really that bad an engineer. The biggest problem is that the reviews happen in person and the reviewer gets nasty and yells at times. He is extremely rude and after a few minutes he tries to explain that all the feedback is for my own good like I'm a kid. I expect some amount of professionalism but I feel disrespected because of the attitude. Is it normal for 2-3 iterations for a slightly complex PR and should I have to chase reviewers each time? Do you any tips on handling the behavioral issues?

What’s the best way to handle a situation as a tech lead when you are under pressure to deliver your tasks and ensure that the other team members are also on track? If one developer slacks and doesn’t meet the deadline, is it automatically the lead's fault, especially if the situation was raised well in advance. If the person continues to under deliver with poorly written code, is it okay to spend time and pair program and get work done just to meet deadlines? Keep in mind that the developer is a junior engineer and requires fair bit of hand holding.

I had to approve a PR, although I was not 100% confident, it wasn’t a breaking code and it wouldn’t have caused any backward compatible issues. I received extremely harsh feedback for approving a sub standard from a peer/colleague. Had I not completed the PR, my manager would have provided feedback on the delayed project, what’s the best way to navigate between two leads or managers who are not aligned and expect different outcomes from the same situation?

Please help.

When I look at my life, there's a lot of social media and technology services I use:

• At work - Outlook and Teams
• Keeping up with Tech Content - LinkedIn, YouTube, and Newsletters
• Personal - Whatsapp, Facebook, SMS, Spotify
• General - Phone and Gmail

I'm trying to develop healthy habits around technology use to facilitate deep work. This involves limiting my exposure to technology.

One strategy I think is a good one is batching checking these things. So only check content sites weekly. A more extreme strategy and one I'm not yet prepared to make is getting rid of my smartphone so I can't check content as often.

Do people have other strategies/habits which work for them or can describe their relationships with these services?

When doing a side-project to add to my resume to learn a new tool (e.g. Spark, Airflow, dbt since I'm a Data Engineer) or even a new language, how long should a good side-project take?

I know this question is incredibly ambiguous in that side-projects can have tremendous variability in terms of their depth and breadth, and I know that the best side projects (those with real users) can never end if you're constantly improving them and taking feature requests.

Still, if I'm a beginner to them and am trying to add 2-3 in the next, say, 3 months, how long (in terms of hours) should a decent side-project take?

I believe Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell says you can do a good resume project in a weekend. That's ambiguous (2 hours or 48 hours straight?), but it at least bounds it.

I often find myself with short blocks of time during the day. For example, I am typing this question in one such block of time right now. I have 15 minutes between the end of my morning stand-up and a debugging session that starts at 10am. I'm wondering how to use these sessions productively, but even more, I am wondering how to not use them unproductively.

It's very easy to go onto YouTube or LinkedIn (my preferred social media sites to waste time) and tell myself I'm being productive because I follow tech people I respect such as Alex and Rahul. However, I now believe that such quick checks are harmful to my productivity.

I'm reading "Deep Work" by Cal Newport and Rule #2 is Embrace Boredom. Rule #3 is Quit Social Media. Both of these rules suggest that I really need to stop checking YouTube and LinkedIn daily, and definitely multiple times a day. Since there actually is valuable content on these platforms (hello again Alex and Rahul), I'm thinking of limiting myself to only checking once a week.

In the meantime, I do have the original issue of how to spend blocks of time <30 minutes. I've solved my current issue by using it to ask this question.

I guess short blocks of time are perfect for shallow tasks like responding to email. But probably just staring into space is better than checking YouTube/LinkedIn.

Any other tips?

My was “When given a take-home assignment, what is a reasonable turnaround time to get it back to them?” I now know it’s within a week.

I was given the assignment to create a basic Django app and was told to spend no more than 3 hours on it. Here’s the short text of the assignment description:

Table Metadata Extractor (Python)

Please provide a Python Django application that has one API endpoint which accepts a database connection string from your DB of choice (Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, MySQL, Postgres), connects to the database using and returns a list of the TableMetadata data objects (see below) for all tables in the database.

TableMetadata = {

columns: List[ColumnMetadata]

num_rows: int

schema: str

database: str

}

ColumnMetadata = {

col_name: str

col_type: str

}

Bonus points for:

·         Instructive error messages for improper connection strings or other invalid input

·         A solution that is efficient

As a Data Engineer/Analyst, I haven’t done web-dev stuff in years and have never used Django. My immediate instinct upon reading this project description was to find a resource to learn Django online. I’m not sure this is the right instinct, because software is about doing more than learning as Alex has mentioned so many times.

The way I see it, I have 3 ways to approach this assignment:

1. The way I just mentioned. Go down a learning path (hopefully not a rabbit hole), learn about Django and try completing the assignment.
2. Dive right in, try building the solution from scratch, Googling and ChatGPTing liberally.
3. Don’t do the assignment, spare myself the time and headache, and beef up my Python web-dev skills for the future.

The first approach requires the most upfront time. The second might be longer or shorter than the first. And the third doesn’t require any upfront time but requires a commitment to being in a much better position to do the assignment in future.

This is the second time in a couple of months I’ve been in this position since I was given an assignment for a different company to build a Flask app and did a shoddy job with it.

My first question is, which of the 3 options should I do to address this time-sensitive situation?

My second is, how should I address this situation long-term? Building some web-dev projects in Python with Flask/Django/FastAPI seems pretty logical. I don’t get to work with them at work, but I could spend a few weeks building stuff with them. I guess that’s the answer, the key is to avoid tutorial hell.

My third is, how should I think about take-home assignments in general? Should they stretch me a lot in terms of learning new things or conversely, should I be, say, 80% comfortable with what I need to do, just stretching a bit here and there to do stuff?

Thanks!

And not only equates story points to hours but is constantly looking at your story points and tries to lower them in an effort to push more work to you. I feel like I'm an assembly line worker instead of a software engineer that solves problems. Have any of you experienced anything similar?