I have worked at both startups and tech companies 40+ years old, and the conclusion I've come to from my anecdata is that every engineer at every company is swamped all the time.
Feature requests and bug reports are easy. Writing features and fixing bugs is hard. Your todo list will always grow faster than you can tackle items. Once a senior engineer retired, and I inherited about a hundred of his bugs out of the 600 or so he left behind.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Working at a consistent pace is better than burning yourself out. The work is omnipresent. It will never stop growing. It will consume all if you let it.
Unless you're at an early-stage startup, let your manager deal with your giant and ever-growing todo list. Let someone more plugged-in to the business side deal with prioritizing, and focus on technical excellence. Unless you aspire to management yourself, that's already plenty to do.
Anyone who tells you every engineer needs to be in touch with every business concern either only works on early-stage projects or is part of a hustle culture that I don't ascribe to. I don't have the energy for technical excellence and knowing everything about the business.
My worry is that you can be technically excellent and fantastic at what you are assigned, only to find later on that the project you've been toiling over has been cancelled or valued far less than another team's work.
I appreciate your experienced perspective greatly and it encouraged reflection (I agree with working at a consistent pace), but I believe there can also be a middle ground to have awareness of business concerns to understand when to switch teams or even companies. It's painful to work very hard at assigned tasks, only to find it wasn't valued due to business priorities.
Yeah that happens. More than once I've thrown away a lot of work due to a shift in priorities. The thing to realize is that as an engineer you have very little control here. All you really can do is argue with higher-ups (they likely won't listen) or job hop (you can't do that too often).
It's sort of like making a movie. You start out with more material than what you need for the finished product because sometimes you don't know what's going to work ahead of time. Yeah, it sucks when you project gets left on the cutting room floor, but it happens. There's plenty more work to do. It might sound cynical, but don't get attached.
In terms of a middle ground, I sort of think about business concerns the same way I think about the news. Be aware, but don't worry, because you don't have much control anyway. If something really important comes around, start preparing to do what you can with what little control you do have (job hop, move out of a place that's about to be a war zone, etc). Don't waste your finite time and attention on day-to-day details. Save it for the big stuff.
A former coworker went through a stretch where his manager deliberately assigned him insufficient work and refused to let him do anything but assigned tasks, in order to get him to quit, and he said it was the most miserable time of his career. Having more work than you can fill your days with is an ideal state of affairs, because it means you never run out of work.
Of course, as you point out, to work like that sustainably it is important to pace yourself, limiting working time. The natural consequence of that is a need for prioritizing the todo list, because not all of it will get done. I say “the” todo list, because if there are multiple they must be merged so it can be determined what tasks come first. It is cumbersome and distracting to do this merging and develop a business understanding of everything landing in an inbox to be able to prioritize it so indeed a natural temptation is to let a manager do this toil, and just follow their cue.
The consequence of letting a manager setting priorities is a loss of control. You have to have faith the manager will give the right kind of work in the right amount. I am not a good fit for this approach, so I tend to take control of my todo list by proposing my own projects or seizing opportunities as they pass by. This does require having good relations up and down the org chart and good insights into the nature of the business, so ymmv.
Seeing work as finite is imho mistaken. The possible work that can be done in a business is effectively infinite, and an effective business will find the best set of work to do with the resources they have, and an optimal level of resources to do enough work to deliver value, but without breaking the bank.
> Having more work than you can fill your days with is an ideal state of affairs, because it means you never run out of work.
I think we have very different approaches to work. I can’t imagine being anything but excited if some asshole boss thought I would quit because he was paying me to do nothing
> A former coworker went through a stretch where his manager deliberately assigned him insufficient work and refused to let him do anything but assigned tasks
Interesting, even if it weren't to make him quit, in my home country (Germany) this would represent a breach of contract.
For what it's worth, I polled HN a while back and there was a perfect normal distribution on hours worked per day: https://imgur.com/qdSltlM. I asked, "How busy are you at work on average?". Poll questions here if you want to see them: https://strawpoll.com/polls/47x15cf1.
So 25% of people work under 4 hours a day including meetings, 50% work 4-8 hours a day, 25% work more than 8 hours a day. And seniority does not affect this curve.
If you live in a normally distributed universe, then you get ahead by being swamped and incrementally doing more hours of work than someone else. But hopefully most engineers hoping to have an impact live in a power law distributed universe.
I tell all my DRs that, at the end of the year, I will evaluate them on their (self-assessed) 3 most impactful things they've done that year with a 60%, 30%, 10% weighting.
There's a couple of different ways of optimizing towards that goal, you can try out a lot of little projects and double down on the ones that seem like they're working or you can do a careful analysis and scope out a few things you think will be a big hit.
In truth, there's no ability for me to evaluate them to that level of precision, the framework is mainly there to foster two skills I regard as vitally missing:
1. Ruthless prioritization. One of my frequent questions is "does this sound like the 4th most important thing you'll do this year? If so, why are you doing it?". Being able to cut down on the noise and really focus is hard for people, especially when they feel like there isn't a permission structure in place for it to happen. Even with an explicit focus in place, the norms of the workplace make clearing away time for deep thought preciously valuable.
2. Owning of measurement of impact. Being able to measure a thing is, I believe, in many ways more important than doing the thing in the first place. Measuring forces us to ask hard questions that we often skip over: What metrics am I hoping to affect via this project? How does this metric tie into the larger goals of the company? Are we measuring this metric already? If not, how do we start? What change in this metric would count as impactful vs other projects I could be doing?
I never met any person who has not claimed in a professional set to be swamped with work. It's unwise to seem not busy. There is no signal here, just socially acceptable noise.
Yeah, as developers you usually get to estimate your work so estimate for however much free time you want. This is especially true the older/bigger the company is. Developers with lots of experience working in a specific application can barely tell how long stuff will take. Your EM/PM/Whoever isn't going to know that you're padding time. As long as most of the time you deliver what you say you will when you say you will nobody will catch on or care.
I don't think that's the best advice. There is no hard line between business, product, and technical concerns. There's a lot of gray area.
If you want to be great at your job, then understanding the context of business and product decisions will let you make more nuanced technical decisions that support where the business is heading, not just where it's at today. If your manager, and PM, and business POCs that you work with are all excellent, then maybe you can get this context from them. But chances are that at least some of the people around you are fairly mediocre, and part of being great at your job is making things happen in spite less than ideal circumstances.
Maybe what I would consider being great at the job is what you would consider unhealthy hustle culture, and that's fine. If you want to just get by and not be exceptional in the role, that's much easier. But in that case, why even focus on technical excellence? You can get by with less.
Basically, if you're gonna slack off, then you might as well slack off across the board. If you want to be excellent, then be excellent across the board.
Frankly I have little interest in being great at my job. It's a job. At the end of the day, I have exactly as much loyalty for the company as they do for me. None. [1] Furthermore, the "rewards" for being great at your job kind of suck, which at most companies is just slowly accruing experience until you get noticed and someone has the bright idea to make you a manager. [2]
I want to be great at software engineering. I want to use tech to build things. I see it as coincidence that there's enough overlap between that goal and the company's goal to at least make me good at my job.
[1] That's a lie. I wish I had no loyalty to the company, but my personal pride in a job well done unfortunately means I have a non-zero amount of company loyalty.
[2] Just happened to me, actually. My stress levels are through the roof, and I didn't even get a raise. Clearly I miscalibrated my job performance.
For most people this would probably lead to exhaustion.
It is doing 2 full time jobs basically. Because you don’t trust your team.
Lets say 80h weeks are OK there is still the hurdle that most corporate structures will actively fight against this level of JD-breaking initiative!
If the product is Dropbox you can talk to mates to do your primary customer research. But what if it is say defence contracts? Gonna be stepping on toes talking direct to customers.
If you are not doing primary research you are relying on those lackluster colleagues.
If you are doing this kind of stuff the job is just in the way, start a business.
For startupish roles where your job might be half coding half VP growth it might work.
I think Engineers should know something the product is used and why etc. But this can only go so far. Otherwise why have other roles at all?
Fundamentally, I agree. Though you need to draw some boundaries between being aware of customer needs and advocating for them during development (and alloying them with realities in your development environment) and being responsible for all customer satisfaction.
I've learned as a matter of survival to abstract availability for more tasks from my actual capacity.
If I don't do this I'm given more work than I can do because I have capacity right now then once I have added tasks invariably later everything comes home to roost at the same time.
You assume that developers don't know how to pad out their todo list, or complete things quickly and then do other things during work time. I've seen a lot of anecdata to support both, but obviously people prefer to say "I'm really busy" or "I work hard" over "I only work 2 hours a day".
My advice is for engineers, not managers. And as an engineer, I'm assuming you already have more than you can do. If your todo list is so short that you can just pad it out like that, well, lucky you.
It has always, and I mean always, been the case for me than I have more to do than I have time to do it. I ask my manager what takes priority, and I work on that. I miss some deadlines, but I try to hit the important ones, and that's just how real life works.
Stop worry about forgetting about a feature idea, or bug description. If it's any important it will come back to you. Stop writing down bad ideas. Have at most 20 tasks on your todo-list, then order them in importance, and if something else comes in you just drop the least important todo/task. Think of tasks/todos as balls, you only have to juggle those that are made of glass, the other balls will bounce back up. If you have a list of 600 issues, most of them are no longer relevant - the code has changed, or the issue no longer exist. It's not the holy bible. Focus on what needs to be done right now - in order to to achieve your near future goals.
But the underlying reason is that some (most?) bugs are not worth fixing.
If they were worth fixing, then managers would hire more engineers and get through the todo list. So engineers might feel swamp but I guess they shouldn't.
I just talked about this with my wife just yesterday about her peer. If you're always the hero to take on too much work and you never keep up, you invite various significant structural problems.
You're too useful to remove, you may not get attention for corrective measures because of fear of the person leaving.
You are often too swamped to effectively get work done smoothly and in an expedient manner.
You become a single point of failure (bus factor 1) so that when you take a vacation / hit by a bus, the company suffers significantly.
A common personality trait of these types of people seem to be self reliance / control seekers. When they own that authority of work, they are less likely to accept delegation to get them out of their woes.
In general, these types of employees may end up being labeled super stars, but they're also potential albatrosses that could significantly wound a company if not properly managed.
When your manager brings you new work and you’re already swamped with work try asking this question: “I have these X other high-priority items on my plate. Which of these would you like me to deprioritize in order to work on this new thing?” Then set expectations on when you think you can get to that new thing, also, it can be helpful to offer reasons why you believe certain things are higher priority. Prioritizing work is important when your feeling like there is too much.
These are the worst kind of employee, yet so many managers who appear too incompetent to find their rear end even when using both hands seem to love these people. These employees serve as a red flag to everybody else - if these employees are rewarded or otherwise encouraged to maintain this behavior then that's your sign your work culture is poor and it's time to go. On your exit interview don't be bashful to state the actual reason you're leaving. I worked at a place once where they had an employee like that and many people were leaving as a result. Someone in upper management got the message loud and clear and the problem was taken care of. I was about to leave when that happened and the place turned out to be awesome once that problem was resolved. A couple of the people who had previously left even came back. Life is too short to tolerate working in a culture like that and these people are very draining to have to interact with.
Yea it's tough. As a manager I dealt with this recently.
Had a guy who was an absolute star. Technically very sound. Committed to doing things properly. Managed his time diligently and productively. Tried to help everybody.
Reacted badly to every attempt I made to find somebody to assist him. I wanted to make sure he could take a vacation and not get a phone call. Also wanted to make sure the company had somebody in place who knew the work in case he decided to leave for some reason.
I see myself in this.
I am being labeled as superstar.
The thing is that I am very quick to understand things and can get a prototype working from a new thing we want to do in a week or two.
This way I know a little of of everything that goes on and when something breaks I am the one who can effectively debug and solve things.
Others can too of course but for me it is usually <1 hour while for others it would take at least the whole day.
I am passionate about my work and proffesion but on other hand don't want to be the albatross you are talking about
Maybe consider freelancing or launching your own company. It sounds like you’re cut out for it. It’s riskier than a steady job of course, but it sounds like you might be getting a bit too comfortable.
It's not solely on the manager if the manager doesn't know because the employee in question is not giving feedback about their workload. Which isn't to say that the manager isn't to blame at all -- there are many things a manager can and should do to proactively suss out such issues.
I wonder if at-will employment in the US influences this. If I'm bus factor 1, they're less likely to fire me.
I have anxiety around losing my job, which makes me more likely to say yes to piling on tasks. It doesn't seem so crazy when you consider my healthcare is directly attached to my employment.
Even if they don't fire you, saying no (to anything, ever) will come back to bite you when performance reviews (and raises and bonuses and stock grants) come around. OP is falling into the common internet commenter trap of assuming that the way the world should work is the way the world does work.
Maya Angelou has a quote that's supposed to be inspirational but is actually depressing as hell: "People will forget what you did, people will forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel." Want to actually succeed in the actual real world and not the fantasy world internet commenters exist in? Focus on making people feel, not on results. If you say "no", they'll remember you made them feel like the person who turned them away when they needed you most. If you just say yes to everything and get to what you can get to, you'll make them feel like the person who tried their best.
Until all of civilization starts rewarding actual results over vague feelings (it never has), focus on appearances.
Dang, you can easily draw a connection between unstable work environments and unstable technical products. It's directly in the workers benefit to keep a product reliant on them or else they could just die. That's crazy.
You're also making yourself too vital to whatever you're doing now - if the conceit is that the team/division/practice/company can't function without you doing your job you'll never be able to be promoted out of it.
I've noticed only a few people do this but the ones that did did it out of either ego or anxiety (sometimes a mix).
They werent usually angling for a promotion.
The anxiety wasnt always unwarranted either. If you're in tons of debt, hate interviewing and work for an organization that doesnt care for people this isnt a wholly irrational strategy.
That has a pretty simple and effective solution though: just mention that you want to leave. I've just been through getting a healthy amount of equity (as a freelancer no less) because someone else announced they were leaving.
If your job is _that_ important, you might not get promoted away, but you'll get the salary as if you were and then some.
Just to add - this can even be a career advancement hurdle. My mom told her about a meeting she had with her boss where she asked for a promotion because she was doing so well at her current role and the boss basically said "yes you're doing more than we've seen before and that's why we're going to keep you right where you are".
I'm a bit wary of the "peter principle" where people generally get promoted until they can't do their job well - but that's an institutional concern. From the perspective of an employee it might make sense to not excel because it could make you too valuable to promote. One of those annoying contradictions where you might have to look out for yourself at the cost of the company you're also trying to help succeed
True! But not every highly-productive person is this. If you keep complexity low, you can have a "single point" without it being high risk.
Recently I was really proud of being able to take a half of a day to document all my systems to have a reasonable assurance that the documentation would contain all the info needed for someone else to step in if they need to and get something done.
And, it is a lot of systems! But we kept the complexity WAY down. And while the engineering is not perfect (is it ever?) I feel confident that someone can step in and work on these systems if I'm not here.
I've been on both sides. A lot of people say people who want to be swamped is a control problem but I've found its more delicate than that. My circumstances require me to have decent insurance so my life will forever be tied to an employer. I don't really get an "escape" at least until obamacare becomes cheaper than $2800/mo. for what I need in order to try out the entrepreneur life.
As a result I work very hard. I end up getting a lot of work done, and thus more work on my plate. This is often manageable and I use this as a gauge of my probability of being fired for any given reason. Someone knocking on the door of a PIP likely won't be getting as much work especially if it's reasonably complicated. It's been my experience as work starts to die down to a less-than-consistent level I'm usually out the door (never fired, but often laid off in this industry).
However, this burned me when I became staff-level because I'd get so much work that despite trying to reduce the bus factor back to "manageable chaos" I was unable to and ended up leaving the job for another one because I became the smart guy in the room.
But overall I aim to walk the razors edge between swamped and normal at all times because it's the only form of security I have. When I am in this condition I am now useful enough I have plenty of power over my employer and my position and for an employee this is an ideal situation to have. Especially when the alternative is extremely expensive "between jobs" insurance, or a less than ideal insurance package from another company.
Have you considered a move to Canada? We always need good people and you can forget about stressing out over healthcare. If I moved to the US right now, I would (as I understand it) probably have a lot of difficulty getting any insurance company to cover me given my pre-existing conditions. If I did find an employer to take me on, it would be stressful knowing I was dependent on them. Here, while I do have an OK health plan to supplement public health care, it is more a nice to have and table stakes for any knowledge work job.
> If I moved to the US right now, I would (as I understand it) probably have a lot of difficulty getting any insurance company to cover me given my pre-existing conditions.
That’s not how it works here. Insurance companies cannot refuse to cover you.
I might actually depending on how things shake out in the US. The idea of having to deal with our healthcare system as an old person sounds like a nightmare. I can kinda navigate it now but it's still a huge pain.
Being swamped always made me feel like I should take longer to complete tasks, to protect myself from the stress of working too hard for too long. Then I realized how insane that is...why should I artificially make myself a less productive person? It's like picking up a bad habit, like smoking.
Imo the real issue is that management needs to learn how to identify people who actively seek out work as their default state, and not heap work onto them. These people naturally try to work close to their limit, so adding more work does not make them more productive.
I would say rather than artificially make yourself less productive, you (talking about anyone, including me) should understand your limits, then keep a healthy margin of slack between your average daily effort (ADE) and those limits. This ADE (i.e. after cutting some slack) is what I would call your real productivity, since it's sustainable.
IMO, always working close to your limit will surely lead to burnout. Not sustainable, and means you'll be less productive on the long run, thua it's not real productivity. This "extra effort reservoir" should only be tapped into when absolutely necessary (say, Critical issue with production)
That said, if your limits are already very high, it means your productivity and output on 80% efficiency is already high, and I see no reason to artificially reduce your output any further.
I read an article long ago about the importance of slack for any workers, I think it's this one [1] though I'm not sure.
Very much this. Like, I know I can juggle 4-6 different system problems at once, context switching every couple of minutes between them. And during more massive outages, this is necessary to get things under control faster, sure.
But it's also extremely mentally exhausting. And when I realized that, I stopped it and limited myself to 2 tasks at once outside of emergencies. Usually a slower-paced task where you fire off something and it does stuff for half an hour, and some smaller chore to do while waiting, or planning for a more involved thing, or reviewing and editing documentation. And if there is nothing to do with both tasks doing stuff... that's fine. Let's go and make some coffee or outside for a minute. Or it's just one thing if it's complex and critical and then I shutdown most communication too.
It's noticeably slower, naturally. However, this slower pace is very good for my mental health and it's beneficial for the team, because it allows other people to get involved with the pieces and systems I usually maintain. A coworker is currently wading through some of the marshlands of infrastructure only I tend to go through and constantly pokes me to document another weird nook or cranny. That's good.
in queueing, this is called backpressure and amazingly it works! so while it may not be logical from efficiency perspective, it might be from the process POV...
i think working hard is ok but you really got to assess the type of work you are doing. Are you working your ass off to do grunt work other devs wont? If so you won't get any glory, just burn out, many times working on tech debt also falls under this domain, higher ups just don't appreciate people who work hard to keep things stable, they are all about those who can cut costs or increase revenue by coming up with new products/ideas.
I ended up in the hospital as well because of the startup that I tried to co-found. 9 years later I still have side effects of that. I was reading your story with interest
I feel like the "I'm swamped" situation is more of a defense mechanic than it is genuine swamping in many cases.
Take the following example: You understand parts of the business that are critical. Those parts are high stakes. Someone asks you something about it and you give a legitimate answer that is correct. You will form a habit in that person of asking you since it's lower risk and far easier than coming up with the answer yourself. In many cases, the only way to wean this off is to instead say sorry I can't get at that right away but if it can wait (x) I can look at it. In many cases the solution will come around on it's own as it is time sensitive.
Anyone in that position will, over time, recognize this and leverage it. Couple that with the fact that any exceptions that happen out of the ordinary will wind up in your purview.
Of course, this is not true of all swamped people - some are just legitimately swamped and don't have enough time in the day to do the workload requested of them - but the guise of a key senior engineer this is usually the case I've seen.
Being swamped in a job as a dev (rather than a startup) is a signal that you're bad at saying no to adding things to a sprint, and unable to hand off work to other people. I'm very wary of working with people like that. It ends badly when things finally get too much.
In my experience, if you aren't totally useless you will eventually you will find yourself completely swamped all the time. Scheduled weeks in advanced, but also expected to be achieving much more.
Eventually you become a huge problem, you cant take vacation, and your time off in lieu just keeps collecting. You get burnt out and end up in sick leave a short time and your employer melts down because they cant function without you.
You find a new job or they fire you and the remaining employees just cant handle reality and they lose lots of customers. Then you get sued for $1.1 million because you're stealing their clients only to find out none of their clients came with. Opps on them.
Readit News
Feature requests and bug reports are easy. Writing features and fixing bugs is hard. Your todo list will always grow faster than you can tackle items. Once a senior engineer retired, and I inherited about a hundred of his bugs out of the 600 or so he left behind.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Working at a consistent pace is better than burning yourself out. The work is omnipresent. It will never stop growing. It will consume all if you let it.
Unless you're at an early-stage startup, let your manager deal with your giant and ever-growing todo list. Let someone more plugged-in to the business side deal with prioritizing, and focus on technical excellence. Unless you aspire to management yourself, that's already plenty to do.
Anyone who tells you every engineer needs to be in touch with every business concern either only works on early-stage projects or is part of a hustle culture that I don't ascribe to. I don't have the energy for technical excellence and knowing everything about the business.
I appreciate your experienced perspective greatly and it encouraged reflection (I agree with working at a consistent pace), but I believe there can also be a middle ground to have awareness of business concerns to understand when to switch teams or even companies. It's painful to work very hard at assigned tasks, only to find it wasn't valued due to business priorities.
It's sort of like making a movie. You start out with more material than what you need for the finished product because sometimes you don't know what's going to work ahead of time. Yeah, it sucks when you project gets left on the cutting room floor, but it happens. There's plenty more work to do. It might sound cynical, but don't get attached.
In terms of a middle ground, I sort of think about business concerns the same way I think about the news. Be aware, but don't worry, because you don't have much control anyway. If something really important comes around, start preparing to do what you can with what little control you do have (job hop, move out of a place that's about to be a war zone, etc). Don't waste your finite time and attention on day-to-day details. Save it for the big stuff.
Of course, as you point out, to work like that sustainably it is important to pace yourself, limiting working time. The natural consequence of that is a need for prioritizing the todo list, because not all of it will get done. I say “the” todo list, because if there are multiple they must be merged so it can be determined what tasks come first. It is cumbersome and distracting to do this merging and develop a business understanding of everything landing in an inbox to be able to prioritize it so indeed a natural temptation is to let a manager do this toil, and just follow their cue.
The consequence of letting a manager setting priorities is a loss of control. You have to have faith the manager will give the right kind of work in the right amount. I am not a good fit for this approach, so I tend to take control of my todo list by proposing my own projects or seizing opportunities as they pass by. This does require having good relations up and down the org chart and good insights into the nature of the business, so ymmv.
Seeing work as finite is imho mistaken. The possible work that can be done in a business is effectively infinite, and an effective business will find the best set of work to do with the resources they have, and an optimal level of resources to do enough work to deliver value, but without breaking the bank.
I think we have very different approaches to work. I can’t imagine being anything but excited if some asshole boss thought I would quit because he was paying me to do nothing
Interesting, even if it weren't to make him quit, in my home country (Germany) this would represent a breach of contract.
Dead Comment
So 25% of people work under 4 hours a day including meetings, 50% work 4-8 hours a day, 25% work more than 8 hours a day. And seniority does not affect this curve.
I tell all my DRs that, at the end of the year, I will evaluate them on their (self-assessed) 3 most impactful things they've done that year with a 60%, 30%, 10% weighting.
There's a couple of different ways of optimizing towards that goal, you can try out a lot of little projects and double down on the ones that seem like they're working or you can do a careful analysis and scope out a few things you think will be a big hit.
In truth, there's no ability for me to evaluate them to that level of precision, the framework is mainly there to foster two skills I regard as vitally missing:
1. Ruthless prioritization. One of my frequent questions is "does this sound like the 4th most important thing you'll do this year? If so, why are you doing it?". Being able to cut down on the noise and really focus is hard for people, especially when they feel like there isn't a permission structure in place for it to happen. Even with an explicit focus in place, the norms of the workplace make clearing away time for deep thought preciously valuable.
2. Owning of measurement of impact. Being able to measure a thing is, I believe, in many ways more important than doing the thing in the first place. Measuring forces us to ask hard questions that we often skip over: What metrics am I hoping to affect via this project? How does this metric tie into the larger goals of the company? Are we measuring this metric already? If not, how do we start? What change in this metric would count as impactful vs other projects I could be doing?
> There is no noise here, just socially acceptable noise.
If you want to be great at your job, then understanding the context of business and product decisions will let you make more nuanced technical decisions that support where the business is heading, not just where it's at today. If your manager, and PM, and business POCs that you work with are all excellent, then maybe you can get this context from them. But chances are that at least some of the people around you are fairly mediocre, and part of being great at your job is making things happen in spite less than ideal circumstances.
Maybe what I would consider being great at the job is what you would consider unhealthy hustle culture, and that's fine. If you want to just get by and not be exceptional in the role, that's much easier. But in that case, why even focus on technical excellence? You can get by with less.
Basically, if you're gonna slack off, then you might as well slack off across the board. If you want to be excellent, then be excellent across the board.
I want to be great at software engineering. I want to use tech to build things. I see it as coincidence that there's enough overlap between that goal and the company's goal to at least make me good at my job.
[1] That's a lie. I wish I had no loyalty to the company, but my personal pride in a job well done unfortunately means I have a non-zero amount of company loyalty.
[2] Just happened to me, actually. My stress levels are through the roof, and I didn't even get a raise. Clearly I miscalibrated my job performance.
It is doing 2 full time jobs basically. Because you don’t trust your team.
Lets say 80h weeks are OK there is still the hurdle that most corporate structures will actively fight against this level of JD-breaking initiative!
If the product is Dropbox you can talk to mates to do your primary customer research. But what if it is say defence contracts? Gonna be stepping on toes talking direct to customers.
If you are not doing primary research you are relying on those lackluster colleagues.
If you are doing this kind of stuff the job is just in the way, start a business.
For startupish roles where your job might be half coding half VP growth it might work.
I think Engineers should know something the product is used and why etc. But this can only go so far. Otherwise why have other roles at all?
If I don't do this I'm given more work than I can do because I have capacity right now then once I have added tasks invariably later everything comes home to roost at the same time.
It has always, and I mean always, been the case for me than I have more to do than I have time to do it. I ask my manager what takes priority, and I work on that. I miss some deadlines, but I try to hit the important ones, and that's just how real life works.
If they were worth fixing, then managers would hire more engineers and get through the todo list. So engineers might feel swamp but I guess they shouldn't.
You're too useful to remove, you may not get attention for corrective measures because of fear of the person leaving.
You are often too swamped to effectively get work done smoothly and in an expedient manner.
You become a single point of failure (bus factor 1) so that when you take a vacation / hit by a bus, the company suffers significantly.
A common personality trait of these types of people seem to be self reliance / control seekers. When they own that authority of work, they are less likely to accept delegation to get them out of their woes.
In general, these types of employees may end up being labeled super stars, but they're also potential albatrosses that could significantly wound a company if not properly managed.
I have 40 hours a week to work. He's welcome to divide that up how he sees fit. I'm not going to start working any more than 40.
Change the conversation from how much to when.
Had a guy who was an absolute star. Technically very sound. Committed to doing things properly. Managed his time diligently and productively. Tried to help everybody.
Reacted badly to every attempt I made to find somebody to assist him. I wanted to make sure he could take a vacation and not get a phone call. Also wanted to make sure the company had somebody in place who knew the work in case he decided to leave for some reason.
The thing is that I am very quick to understand things and can get a prototype working from a new thing we want to do in a week or two.
This way I know a little of of everything that goes on and when something breaks I am the one who can effectively debug and solve things. Others can too of course but for me it is usually <1 hour while for others it would take at least the whole day.
I am passionate about my work and proffesion but on other hand don't want to be the albatross you are talking about
Enthusiastic contributors are rare and good.
Lazy managers who hope reports will self-manage are not.
I have anxiety around losing my job, which makes me more likely to say yes to piling on tasks. It doesn't seem so crazy when you consider my healthcare is directly attached to my employment.
Maya Angelou has a quote that's supposed to be inspirational but is actually depressing as hell: "People will forget what you did, people will forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel." Want to actually succeed in the actual real world and not the fantasy world internet commenters exist in? Focus on making people feel, not on results. If you say "no", they'll remember you made them feel like the person who turned them away when they needed you most. If you just say yes to everything and get to what you can get to, you'll make them feel like the person who tried their best.
Until all of civilization starts rewarding actual results over vague feelings (it never has), focus on appearances.
They werent usually angling for a promotion.
The anxiety wasnt always unwarranted either. If you're in tons of debt, hate interviewing and work for an organization that doesnt care for people this isnt a wholly irrational strategy.
If your job is _that_ important, you might not get promoted away, but you'll get the salary as if you were and then some.
I'm a bit wary of the "peter principle" where people generally get promoted until they can't do their job well - but that's an institutional concern. From the perspective of an employee it might make sense to not excel because it could make you too valuable to promote. One of those annoying contradictions where you might have to look out for yourself at the cost of the company you're also trying to help succeed
Recently I was really proud of being able to take a half of a day to document all my systems to have a reasonable assurance that the documentation would contain all the info needed for someone else to step in if they need to and get something done.
And, it is a lot of systems! But we kept the complexity WAY down. And while the engineering is not perfect (is it ever?) I feel confident that someone can step in and work on these systems if I'm not here.
As a result I work very hard. I end up getting a lot of work done, and thus more work on my plate. This is often manageable and I use this as a gauge of my probability of being fired for any given reason. Someone knocking on the door of a PIP likely won't be getting as much work especially if it's reasonably complicated. It's been my experience as work starts to die down to a less-than-consistent level I'm usually out the door (never fired, but often laid off in this industry).
However, this burned me when I became staff-level because I'd get so much work that despite trying to reduce the bus factor back to "manageable chaos" I was unable to and ended up leaving the job for another one because I became the smart guy in the room.
But overall I aim to walk the razors edge between swamped and normal at all times because it's the only form of security I have. When I am in this condition I am now useful enough I have plenty of power over my employer and my position and for an employee this is an ideal situation to have. Especially when the alternative is extremely expensive "between jobs" insurance, or a less than ideal insurance package from another company.
That’s not how it works here. Insurance companies cannot refuse to cover you.
Imo the real issue is that management needs to learn how to identify people who actively seek out work as their default state, and not heap work onto them. These people naturally try to work close to their limit, so adding more work does not make them more productive.
IMO, always working close to your limit will surely lead to burnout. Not sustainable, and means you'll be less productive on the long run, thua it's not real productivity. This "extra effort reservoir" should only be tapped into when absolutely necessary (say, Critical issue with production)
That said, if your limits are already very high, it means your productivity and output on 80% efficiency is already high, and I see no reason to artificially reduce your output any further.
I read an article long ago about the importance of slack for any workers, I think it's this one [1] though I'm not sure.
[1] http://www.everydaykanban.com/2012/07/27/slack-is-not-a-dirt...
But it's also extremely mentally exhausting. And when I realized that, I stopped it and limited myself to 2 tasks at once outside of emergencies. Usually a slower-paced task where you fire off something and it does stuff for half an hour, and some smaller chore to do while waiting, or planning for a more involved thing, or reviewing and editing documentation. And if there is nothing to do with both tasks doing stuff... that's fine. Let's go and make some coffee or outside for a minute. Or it's just one thing if it's complex and critical and then I shutdown most communication too.
It's noticeably slower, naturally. However, this slower pace is very good for my mental health and it's beneficial for the team, because it allows other people to get involved with the pieces and systems I usually maintain. A coworker is currently wading through some of the marshlands of infrastructure only I tend to go through and constantly pokes me to document another weird nook or cranny. That's good.
Ended up putting me in the hospital.
https://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to...
Take the following example: You understand parts of the business that are critical. Those parts are high stakes. Someone asks you something about it and you give a legitimate answer that is correct. You will form a habit in that person of asking you since it's lower risk and far easier than coming up with the answer yourself. In many cases, the only way to wean this off is to instead say sorry I can't get at that right away but if it can wait (x) I can look at it. In many cases the solution will come around on it's own as it is time sensitive.
Anyone in that position will, over time, recognize this and leverage it. Couple that with the fact that any exceptions that happen out of the ordinary will wind up in your purview.
Of course, this is not true of all swamped people - some are just legitimately swamped and don't have enough time in the day to do the workload requested of them - but the guise of a key senior engineer this is usually the case I've seen.
In my experience, if you aren't totally useless you will eventually you will find yourself completely swamped all the time. Scheduled weeks in advanced, but also expected to be achieving much more.
Eventually you become a huge problem, you cant take vacation, and your time off in lieu just keeps collecting. You get burnt out and end up in sick leave a short time and your employer melts down because they cant function without you.
You find a new job or they fire you and the remaining employees just cant handle reality and they lose lots of customers. Then you get sued for $1.1 million because you're stealing their clients only to find out none of their clients came with. Opps on them.