I can't keep up
Posted by Disastrous_Gap_6473@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 38 comments
I got into this because I enjoy the deep work. At this level (senior, shooting for staff) I don't think there's any left for me to do. Everything is easy but it's all happening at the same fucking time.
Kube charts are broken because of SA permissions on our secret store. If I change and push this enough times it will work. DB schema needs a tiny change. Easy, push it and open PR. Feedback on another PR, all easy stuff, correct it, push it, the DB schema PR is finished building, I got tagged in a design thread but the discussion is already moving on without me, more PR feedback, address it, commit, push, the kube charts thing failed CI again and I need to change/commit/push it, that design thread is going off and I have to say something or it'll look like I'm checked out, I forgot about the schema change PR and it finished building half an hour ago and I could've queued for the QA environment but now it's backed up, there's three PRs waiting for my review so I can use the time to oh, wait, no, C-suite is wading into eng channels and I gotta make sure I'm seen, design thread is going off again, kube charts failed and honestly I'm not sure if this will just work on enough pushes and maybe I have to tag in delivery tooling and god knows when they'll get back to me but at least the QA environment is unblocked oh shit that was twenty minutes ago and there's people waiting behind me and my deploy failed anyway and it'll take five minutes to rebuild and now there's a meeting for somebody else's project that's blocking mine that I need to be in (mostly to be seen) and the fucking DB schema thing never actually got QA'd it's just been *sitting* there
I'm not good at this. I've gotten better at it, but I still suck at it. I want to delegate it to someone else, but if I did I'm not sure what I'd even do all day. All this bullshit is what my project needs most right now.
Mortimer452@reddit
It's called context-switching and I'm not good at it either. Some people are wired for it, others just aren't.
hippydipster@reddit
No, they aren't wired for it. They're wired to present themselves as handling it.
Disastrous_Gap_6473@reddit (OP)
I have several team members who are very clearly great at it, and I respect the hell out of them and would like to just leave it to them. But it seems like if I don't do this, I just become invisible.
DER_PROKRASTINATOR@reddit
Can you consider writing an end-of-day / end-of-week wrap-up message, stating what you did and what you'll focus on next? Maybe in a semi-public engineering channel, or in a private one where at least your manager can see it.
I worked with a PM once who started writing these end-of-week summaries in our public team channel. When I asked him what that was all about, he told me it's a way to keep senior management off our backs. If we feed them this information, they won't come after us asking for updates. Made a lot of sense, and actually worked quite well.
SoloAquiParaHablar@reddit
It's fake productivity. Engineers should not be context switching, the most valuable use of your time is applying your problem solving skills to a deep technical problem that delivers value, not fighting the CI and half a dozen unrelated tasks. But you know this.
Don't feel bad. Learn to set aside time for trivial things. Reading Deep Work helped put things in perspective for me. I really enjoy working like that. Unfortunately you do get a lot of managers who need you to be on call for their every whimsical query.\
If we could put a dollar figure to all this wasted time, your company would change its tune real quick. Wasted engineering hours are a massive money pit.
InterestRelative@reddit
> I just become invisible
However, you wanted to do a deep focus work in the beginning. Immediate visibility and deep focus are conflicting goals.
improbablywronghere@reddit
I am very good at it and I have ADHD like crazy. I went into management because being in a perpetual state of context interruption kinda works for me lol
GlobalCurry@reddit
Also unless you have a supportive manager don't tell them you prefer deep work and hate context switching.
Disastrous_Gap_6473@reddit (OP)
My manager is attentive and very helpful when there's something he can do to help. I don't really know what to ask him for here, though. When I was the only one on this project, I got to do some deep work... but it wasn't going to get done with just me, and we're past the prototyping and experimentation phase now. We really need to move a lot of tickets, and I don't know what anyone could do to make moving a lot of tickets not feel like this.
safetytrick@reddit
Sometimes the thing to do is to fully solve a little thing. If it's causing toil you need to fix the SA on the chart.
The way to build velocity on tickets is to polish your own flow. Maybe talk through some small things like that with your manager?
tmswfrk@reddit
Most people aren’t!
hw999@reddit
every team needs a mix of multi taskers and deep thinkers. You will have problems if you end up with too many of one kind. I would talk to you boss and your team and try to assign work accorsing to preference. You should take the larger, week plus projects. Let the small support stories go to the multi taskers. win-win.
MaleficentCow8513@reddit
Sorry for the stupid question but why do so many people use forks and pull requests instead of just a branch on the target repo? I get annoyed at work because sometimes people will need help on their PRs and I won’t have permission to clone their fork
Disastrous_Gap_6473@reddit (OP)
We use branches, but we still require a PR to merge the branch. The only time I'd use a fork is for an OSS repo where you can't fully trust your collaborators
Izkata@reddit
Which is called a merge request, not a pull request. Pretty sure that's why they were confused.
SemaphoreBingo@reddit
Start by putting up a stick and insist on this being fixed.
Inevitable_Guide_942@reddit
you need to go to a smaller firm
daredeviloper@reddit
I feel that. And now add AI on top of that where agents are running jobs in parallel and we have to check in on them…
djnattyp@reddit
Reverse Centaur
wiriux@reddit
I want to get to the point where I can confidently say that everything is easy :’)
SiOD@reddit
Breath and delegate.
You sound like you're touching a lot of very separate areas, it might be time to let other people take the lead on them.
Aggravating-Cheek318@reddit
yeah but delegation doesn't really help with the "you need to respond right now or people think you're dead" thing lol, like those are separate problems. i handed off a bunch of QA stuff and still felt like i was glued to slack anyway. Agentiqa at least took some of the babysitting-builds stress off but the whole "gotta be seen or it looks bad" thing... idk i still don't have a fix for that honestly, and i'm not sure it's even fixable by changing how you work. might just be the job at this level? but also maybe i'm wrong about that
netwhoo@reddit
OR this individual is mis-leveled and shouldn’t be handling so much at once.
GlobalCurry@reddit
Well usually a senior should be delegating tasks out more and it seems like OP isn't?
netwhoo@reddit
Not in this day and age, use an agent
SamurottX@reddit
Are you going to have an agent post in slack for you? Is an agent going to fix their broken CI, especially the queueing?
fatty_lumpkn@reddit
I don't know what agents you're using, but opus4.7 xhigh produces shit half the time and requires babysitting.
boneskull@reddit
like, to the juniors nobody is hiring?
Wise-Share4926@reddit
Architecture, mentorship, cross-team strategy, written tech docs. Those need 2-hour blocks, not 20-minute gaps.
Longjumping_Feed3270@reddit
That's what we're being paid for.
I used to hate it too, but since I made the mental transition to AI herder, this is the new thing that makes me feel useful.
OriginalTangle@reddit
I'm not a big fan of AI but I would expect that you could set up a local agent so it could keep tabs on the more superficial tasks maybe?
Disastrous_Gap_6473@reddit (OP)
This is something I'm working on, actually -- deterministic automation where possible and an agent for the other stuff. I'm hopeful, but it's been a lot of work and it isn't usable yet.
skg1979@reddit
There's a limit to the amount of context switching I can manage and still be effective. The limit is pretty low.
vinny_twoshoes@reddit
it's hard. but it sounds like that's just too much stuff. the path forward that i've found is twofold:
1. be very clear with myself and others about what my priorities are, and i make sure i stick to them. i have reminders all over the place to help me not lose track of threads.
2. if i can't do something, i don't commit to it. either i delegate, or i just tell someone that i'm at capacity already, or i say that something else will have to be deprioritized. i have a sticky note on my monitor that says "if I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?"
as a result i often do _less_ now than i used to when i was overcommitting, but i am much more reliable and transparent about what i'm doing and when. i communicate timelines and i follow through on them (or i notify early if something is taking longer).
in short, by being strict and doing LESS, people's perception of my performance and trustworthiness is much higher now than it used to be.
edwardsdl@reddit
Sounds like you need to break out the Eisenhower matrix.
BendableBender@reddit
Your problem is that you’re trying to do too many low impact things at the same time, rather than drive one high quality thing out at a time.
You don’t need to be present in every little slack thread.
You don’t need to address review feedback immediately.
Part of being staff is understanding what is important and what is not, and organizing your day around getting the important stuff done first.
obelix_dogmatix@reddit
Hey, pause. It’s okay. What you described happens to everyone. It is a mess the higher up you go. Learn to reflect stress, not absorb it. There is only so much stuff you can do with 2 hands and 1 brain. If too much is being dumped on your plate, someone is bad at delegating. It’s either you or your manager.
startupwith_jonathan@reddit
senior dev = professional tab juggler