Changes

Intro

I just read my previous post about my fading productivity. I thought that my productivity had dropped off because I’ve been working from home the past two years, but after visiting New York and working for a week in the office, I noticed that my productivity isn’t much better being pampered and fed alongside my fellow engineers. The rate that I produce work isn’t a function of how focused I am, it’s a function of my technical ability. Knowing exactly what the next system to debug should be, knowing how to fix build errors, and knowing how to respond to SEVs will make me faster, not focusing more. Too much of my time is spent asking myself if I should do something. I need to know what to do, then do it.

While I was at the office, there were plenty of distractions. At home there are too, but when I get distracted at home, I know it’s my fault. The reason I don’t feel guilty for being distracted in the office is because I know the distractions are out of my control. I need to accept that there is only a limited amount of time that I actually spend producing work, and make that time more effective.

I’m going to talk about two new ideas that I’m going to bring into my life to make me more effective:

• I’m going to start growing again at work.
• I’m going to create an Annual calendar similar to an academic school year

Growing Pains

It’s been a long time since I put a big amount of effort into my career. In a previous post, I talked about some of the chapters in my life and showed a basic graph of my happiness vs my productivity. Someday, I’ll add some more data to the graph, but today, I’m declaring that it’s time to grow again – to be productive.

The reason I’m doing this is because this week was such a kick to the dick. This week at work was really tough, and I feel like I failed. I was on call at work and felt overwhelmed, behind, and stressed. When questions would come in the channel, I wouldn’t have answers; when incidents started, I couldn’t fix them alone; when it came time to work on my tasks, I couldn’t make progress. This entire week sucked, but this was the ass kicking I needed. I don’t want to feel this anymore at work. I want to reach a terminal level, and I want work to feel easy for me. I want to be able to sign on in the morning, be effective and efficient, then sign off for the day happy with the amount of work I did.

This is going to be hard, but this might be the last time that I have to do this. The last time I had to grow like this were the first two years of my career. I was 22, new to the Valley, and new to work. I felt like I needed to get a strong foothold here to launch my career, so I pushed myself to what felt like 95% of my effort. It was hard, but after getting into Lyft, succeeding at Lyft, and finally getting promoted at Lyft, I felt like I could relax. I joined a new team, slacked off a little, then slacked off a lot when I took my 6 month career break. All that work took me from the early career, to mid career. At a technical level, I feel like I’m in the mid-game. This next push is going to take me from the mid-game to the endgame. I imagine that this is going to take 2 years, but as long as I keep my goal in front of me, I’ll be able to do it.

The goal is to get promoted to Senior Software Engineer at Datadog. Since being at Datadog, I’ve felt like titles are deflated here. Getting a Senior added to my name would mean even more to me here than if I’d gotten it anywhere else. After getting promoted the first time, I was pretty disappointed by the feeling. I distinctly remember seeing the result of my promo packet and feeling empty, as if all that hard work had just gotten me more of the same work – nothing changed. When my mentor – the person who built me into a stronger engineer, the person who really deserved the credit for my promo – heard the news, he just said, “Well, onwards and upwards.” He was obviously excited and proud of me, but those words really stuck. I felt like promotions were just a carrot they dangle in front of you to get you to work harder. Until now, this discouraged my career efforts. I’m realizing now that things only have the value you give it. If I kept that opinion of promotions, I’d never want another one.

When I was struggling in high school, I had a girlfriend who was flourishing. The greatest piece of advice she gave me came when we were talking about how I could do better in school. She told me “never to accept anything less than an A.” After hearing that, I started putting much more effort into school, and eventually succeeded as much as I wanted to, but when my first promotion had a regrettably deflationary effect on my career, I became discouraged from working, and since then I haven’t been the same. I’m changing that mindset now.

With the exception of titles, it’s so difficult to measure career growth. Do I measure how much impact I had with this project, how much I mentored a young engineer, or how much my communication skills have improved? It’s all so arbitrary, but titles give me a tangible, measurable checkpoint and tasks I can derive from it. For example, to get promoted I need to work X big project that I can put in my packet, I need to handle Y many incidents, and contribute to Z many cross team initiatives. So despite all the unsatisfying feelings I felt after my first promotion…

By December 2023, I’ll be a Senior Software Engineer, and I won’t accept anything less.

My New Calendar

A long time ago, my manager gave me some really good advice. When I come to work, my goal should be to crush it for <8 hours, then go home and completely forget about work. At the time, I ignored the advice because I was working all the time and loving it. That obviously wasn’t sustainable and I took a career break, but now that I’m working again, that advice makes much more sense.

I’m going to take his advice a little further. Instead of adding that temporal structure to my day, I’m going to start adding some structure to my year, similar to an academic calendar. I’ll put in some periods of time when I work a lot, and some time when I do the bare minimum.

• January - chill
• February - hard
• March - hard
• April - hard
• May - hard
• June - chill - Solo week
• July - hard
• August - hard
• September - hard - Think week
• October - hard
• November - hard
• December - chill

Solo week is something I just came up with. Every June, I’m going to plan a week-long trip out of the country. If I can’t find anyone to come with me, I’ll go alone. The purpose of this trip is to enjoy it. Take some time to go somewhere you haven’t been and have as much fun as possible.

Think week is something I learned from Bill Gates. Think week is a week-long PTO in September, where I get an Airbnb somewhere remote and read all week long. I’m thinking that the Pacific Northwest or somewhere with poor internet would be great. Any subject is in bounds here: politics, economics, math, computer science, poetry. Just learn anything.

This isn’t to say that I won’t take any other PTO throughout the year. I’m just ensuring that I use at least two weeks for these two trips.

Outro

These are some pretty big changes coming up for me, but so much in my life has been changing recently, I don’t know how a few more could hurt. I changed teams. COVID happened. I got depressed. I quit my job and took 6 months off. I got a new job. I’m moving to LA soon. I bought a dog. I became really angry, irritable, and impatient. I bought a car. I broke up with my girlfriend. Things have been too tumultuous. I need to add some structure in the form of goals and schedules to temper my life. Hopefully they do.