Edit : I appreciate all the PoVs and I will reply to everyone. This is important to me. Just going to go rest a bit and I’ll be back.
Edit : Leaving the self-insulting language in, but yeah… Point taken, I should stop being so mean to myself. And to add another FYI, I’ve been on this codebase for about 3 months, which I probably should have mentioned.
I have no idea what is wrong with me. I get tasks, I work on them, they NEVER seem to close. Meanwhile everyone around me is left and right solving their issues. I reach out for a second opinion because I must just be stupid, and every time I reach out the person is never able to assist in any meaningful way.
It’s like my tasks always have blockers that everyone around me seems perplexed by, I get a lot of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” or, “Yeah your job does seem to have a lot of unusual blockers.”
I’m at the point where I’m in a daily meeting where I explain what I’m working on to a senior dev because obviously they noticed I’m a person on the team with sometimes zero points in a whole month. It’s so discouraging to have to go to a daily meeting because apparently I’m stupid? The thing is, when I explain what I’m blocked by, every person has said, “Oh weird, this seems like a really confusing task.” Or, “Damn I’ve never seen anything like that.”
So obviously I look at other peoples’ tasks… what are they working on? And their tasks are SO simple and straightforward, yet I’ve NEVER had a task like that, all my tasks were opened years ago, remained open for months or years, then were assigned to me. And they’re all fucky. Wth.
Tbh I’m running out of things to write because I don’t want to justify it, because I feel like I should be doing better. What the hell is wrong with me?
I have wanted to change jobs for close to two years now… but you’ve all interacted with recruiters… they never help, and job search is impossible as a person with anxiety and possibly autism?
I love coding, I hate my coding environment… Anyone else ever have this type of issue in programming?
Who is your PM or senior assigning the tasks? You need to take this up with them – everyone always needs a couple of quick hits in their back pocket. When you stall out grinding on task after impossible task it kills your motivation and productivity, and that’s your boss’s job to fix.
I’m a contractor, so the senior devs on the team dig through the backlog and hand out tasks from that usually. They don’t seem like very important tasks, just usually have been open for a long time, current main tasks have been open two years and three years respectively before assigned to me.
I see two possible reasons for your situation. One is that the company is turning to contractors to fill in gaps in their knowledge/experience, which is why everyone else has no clue how to tackle these tasks and why they get assigned the easy ones.
The other possibility is that the senior devs are gaming the metrics, letting the employees knock out easy tasks while the contractor is stuck with untangling the knots of the more intractable tasks.
This sounds like the main problem. They’re assigning you tasks that no one else wants to do or that aren’t high priority. That means the task is difficult or unpleasant in some way, or they don’t actually care that much about it and won’t prioritize anyone else to help resolve your blockers.
It may be difficult, but I think you should have a conversation with whoever you report to about what their expectations are and how they expect blockers to be resolved if no one prioritizes your tasks. You may need to approach this less defensively and make it clear that clearing these blockers is not your responsibility. If the person you report to isn’t a team lead/manager then I would escalate the problem to a manager and make it clear you’re not getting the resources you need to do your work.
I sometimes do things (cleanup, refacs) off-ticket / not part of the ticket. It can be a light alternative when other stuff is complicated and demotivating. Depending on your environment and team/contract setup, simply doing it could be more difficult though.
If it serves your satisfaction and productivity, and is good for the product, then it’s not wasted. Not everything has to be - or even can be - preplanned.
I probably can’t solve your issue entirely, but if it helps, one thing I note from your post is that most of your stress seems to come from YOU trying to be too hard on yourself. Did anyone call you stupid? Yes, you did. Did anyone say that you should just quit? Yes, you did. Stop being so mean to your coworker! Yes, even/especially if that person is you!:-D
Second, to get accurate information, LISTEN to your teammates!
I get a lot of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” or, “Yeah your job does seem to have a lot of unusual blockers.”
Especially those more senior than you!
when I explain what I’m blocked by, every person has said, “Oh weird, this seems like a really confusing task.” Or, “Damn I’ve never seen anything like that.”
(emphasis added)
What they gave to you to do is on them, but how you handle it is on you. Don’t stress yourself out too much.
Third, yes you got called into a meeting with a senior dev. USE that to your advantage. If you were really were stupid, this is your time to get that crucial feedback - if accurate, then better to get out now before you get too deep and find it even more difficult to change careers. However, it seems to be the case that it is NOT accurate, and that information is INCREDIBLY HELPFUL, and you may want to treat that great feedback with the value that it has instead of dismissing it?
Also, that senior dev can help you boost your skills. How many people get that opportunity? Free training, woot! Even/especially if it is not related merely to technical skills but skills on how to exist in a job environment.
Fourth, you might also want to touch base with whoever created that ticket. They might even say “oh yeah that is still there? I totally forgot about that. Nowadays that would make zero sense, ever since we implemented that XYZ thing about a year and a half back. Just ignore it and go on to something else.” YOU could be the one knocking those tickets out of the park, resolving each one simply as “Won’t Do” citing “owner said so”. Okay, I doubt they will all be so easy, but it’s a thought.
And you seemed like you needed an ego booster. Sorry, I don’t know how to do that well, but the least I could do is spend some time on your issue, so that you know that you are not alone. I hope these musings help some too:-D.
Yeah, it’s an anxiety / self-esteem thing I suspect. I’m working with medical outside of work, but I’m in a country with poor healthcare support and basically nil mental health support so we’ll see how that goes. I already have a significant amount of medical debt from going to the doctor for a stress-related vision loss… medical debt which I just ignore because I felt that a ten-thousand dollar bill for seeking medical help and getting tests was stupid so I refuse to pay or interact with the debt-collectors. For the record, the outcome of this 10k bill was, “Idk, doesn’t make sense, you’re discharged after we monitor you overnight.”
Anyway, healthcare tangent aside, I am too hard on myself. Meditation is the main thing I’ve found that helps.
Your thoughts definitely help, new perspectives are invaluable. I just have my one.
You’re out here solving impossible problems. You’re “The Fixer” from Pulp Fiction. Fools look at story points. Pros see an unsolvable story that languished for years until you came along and defeated it. A single point for you is an entire epic to other teams.
Everything is a differentiator that can be spun to your advantage. The points aren’t accurate, and you’re the only one with enough guts to step up to the plate and finally work these neglected tickets; even if it won’t “look good” on some “dashboard” - that’s not what’s important; you’re here to help the organization succeed.
If the system doesn’t make you look good, you have to make yourself look good. If you weren’t putting in the effort, it would be hard - but as you say, everyone who takes a deeper look clearly sees the odds stacked against you, and how hard you’re working / the progress you’re making; despite those odds.
Don’t let some metrics dashboard decide your worth, king!
If your company is using story points to “measure” developers, they are completely misusing that concept, and it probably results in a low-teamwork environment (as you describe).
The purpose of story points is so a team can say “we’re not taking more than X work for the next two weeks. Make sure it’s the important stuff.” It is a way to communicate a limit to force prioritization by the product owner.
And, in fact, data shows that point estimation so poorly converges on reality that teams may as well assign everything a “1”. The key technique is to try to make stories the same size, and to reduce variability by having the team swarm/mob to unblock stuck work.
Who creates these tasks? They need to close the year old items, reevaluate the work and break it down into sub-5-day chunks. If there are so many unknowns that it’s impossible to do that, the team needs to brainstorm how to resolve them.
Ahh, I see. I had no idea. I’m not from a programming background originally but fought hard to get into a programming job from a closely-related field. The way our team uses them is to justify our contracting support, “Look at our developers, they did X points! You should contract more work to our company!”
So if point estimation is that poor, maybe I should stop agonizing over adding points to a task… it always feels like I’m broadcasting that I can’t solve a task when the points go… 5… 10… 15… 20… 25… etc.
Who creates these tasks? Anyone can, most of the existing tasks were created by people I’ve never met, sometimes people no longer with the company, sometimes people on a different development team, the tasks get assigned to the team working on “the product” that we support and then are handed out.
It’s already been said a couple times but if your more experienced team members are saying, “that’s a really weird task” the issue is probably the task not you.
Having daily meetings with a senior because you’re having a lot of trouble progressing isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has jobs that are absolute ordeals and sometimes it’s better to break them down even further and just go one step at a time.
Also, are you involved in your team sprint planning? Who says “this ticket is a 1 day job” that should be your teammates, or at least a subset of them? Why did they decide this was an easy task? What did they, or you, miss in the execution?
Alright, I never thought about the daily meetings like that, probably because of the context with which they started. It started because the guy who manages the points doesn’t develop or understand software, he just reports progress of the team via points to the contract-host-company (we’re all contractors on my team).
I’m not involved in any planning, I just get assigned stuff. As far as estimating how large the bugs are, that would be me, but I’ve only arrived working on this new code base three months ago so my estimates would be random guesses since I don’t understand the larger context of any of the jobs, nor how the moving parts fit together. So what I do is take a job, then just add two points every day, one of my tasks is well over thirty points at this time.
I’m not sure how task difficulty is determined or if it is at all? It seems to be more that they chose these bugs just because they make sense for a new team member to get working on something, but that’s just a guess.
Story points are bullshit and I just hope it’s not the sole metric you’re judged on, or at least your team don’t see it that way. If you do, definitely try to steal a bunch of easy tickets to even out the playfield.
How many story points can I complete? I don’t know because that’s a hard no for my team, but if we did, probably would not have many points either unless you assign like hundreds of points to my tickets. Some take me weeks and months to get through.
Why? Because I get assigned all the incredibly cursed tickets, and those get assigned to me for a reason: they’re my kind of specialty and I’m the senior on the team with the skills to tackle them. And my performance reviews still say I exceed expectations. I complete those in record time, comparatively.
I deal with and fix things most people don’t even dare to touch. It’s a well known fact all the way to the CTO and other senior staff of adjacent teams. It’s just, you can’t break down tasks to half day tickets when all you know is there’s a giant rabbit hole and you can’t see how deep it is until you start digging into it. I’m the guy that can just pull out GDB and strace and debug the interpreter that runs the software. My colleagues write standard PHP/NodeJS meanwhile I go browse the PHP and V8 source code to get down deep into why things break, report and fix bugs upstream. NodeJS crashing on a SIGPIPE on a socket that’s already closed? Yep, figured it out down to the exact series of syscalls that led there. Sometimes I have people from teams I never talked to reach out to me with their problems, because when you’re real stuck, you go get Max’s input on it.
Ultimately, you should talk about that with your manager. Is your manager happy with your performance? Does your team seem frustrated with your performance? It’s very possible you get the tougher ones because people know you can handle those. If you’re struggling that badly and somehow you end up with the hard tickets, your manager is dropping the ball hard and not setting you up for success.
Also replying to that bit:
and job search is impossible as a person with anxiety and possibly autism?
Don’t give up, job hunting is super fucked up right now with the market flooded with good engineers freshly laid off FAANG and other big companies.
Autism sucks hard at times, but I don’t think I would be where I am without. Use it to your advantage, your abstract computer knowledge can grow much further than most people can possibly care to get into.
I love coding, I hate my coding environment… Anyone else ever have this type of issue in programming?
Yeah, we all do, all the time. I swear the only reason therapists can earn so much is because of all the programmers are racing to afford them.
I would actually go talk to your manager about this. I feel you are unsure about whether the problem is:
- you always get the hardest tasks and thus seem incompetent among the others, or
- you actually can’t finish tasks that others would be able to, they are just too nice to tell you.
If it’s the first, then your manager should help ease the load, or at least you could get recognized for your efforts for doing the heavy lifting for the team. If it’s the second, your manager will still be able to tell you that, and then at least you know you actually need to git gud.
all my tasks were opened years ago, remained open for months or years, then were assigned to me
That says to me, it’s the first. I’d ask people when something like that gets assigned to me; what changed that makes it possible to close this that wasn’t true in the past years? Or why don’t we close it with a “won’t fix”, since nobody seems to have missed the thing for years?
That said, there are three things I’d like to say to that:
First, story points are not for you to obsess over on how many you can complete in a sprint. They are also not there to compare people to each other. They are solely to try to guesstimate how long something is going to take, so that the PM is not flying completely blind. If a task really was estimated at some points, then the team agrees you were justified in taking a lot longer, then the team fucked up with estimating. If that’s consistent, then the team should have a conversation about why their estimates are off.
Second, yeah, the job market sucks now, that’s also not on you. Try to obsess less about your work. I know it’s really hard to do so, and I’ve gone through a bunch of experiences myself where I got closer and closer to burning out. Try to find something other than work to obsess over, that helped me a bit. I know it’s hard. I’ve failed to do so many times already. If you are worried about your career, just know that every day you spend biding your time at the current place makes you worth more in a better market to come.
Lastly, it will get easier later on. I sucked a lot during my first few years. You learn through the suckitude. That’s what you’re there for. You will be able to solve these later in your career. These issues, not the code or the tricky bugs are the ones that need experience.
Thank you for you PoV. I may respond more thoroughly when I’m less moody / exhausted. I feel like I’d just be a crybaby right now, and I am really trying to avoid that.
People need to be crybabies at times. We all have feelings. Bottling them up will only leave you burnt out and with more mental problems than you went in with.
Take your time, we’ve all been there, and this does not make you a bad engineer. It only makes you human.
If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:
Potential problems with the tasks:
- they’re not researched sufficiently
- is this doable?
- should we we even be doing this?
- have we actually thought about how hard this will be, or did someone say “well that should be trivial” a bunch?
- there’s not enough info on the tickets
- inexperienced leads tend to just shit out tickets with zero info and underpoint them
- they’re not broken down into small enough pieces
- are you working “implement X” tickets while everyone else is working a series of “implement X: step N” tickets?
A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.
Potential problems with the codebase:
- someone preemptively optimized it
- it’s not documented well
- it’s spidery bullshit code that someone has deep emotional attachment to
Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)
Potential problems with teammates:
- they’re not supporting you
- they’re grabbing easy tasks because you’re the “code whisperer”
- they didn’t know what they were doing either so they’re vague when you ask them questions
Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”
And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.
Hang in there.
- they’re not researched sufficiently
i took french for 5 years. i cannot speak french. i love the language, and i try… but i could never become fluent like my classmates.
i dont know what the answer is for you, but maybe, you need to switch gears to something programming-related instead of hands on coding.
Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about this. Thing is, to advance to something else usually you need to excel in what you are doing, yeah? So seems like that isn’t in the cards, I pass out from stress naps almost every day at 6p, possibly due to anxiety which compounds the whole experience… kinda just hate waking up every morning at this point.
I worked SO hard to get into this field, and I love creating things… but nothing ever seems to come together for me. Decided to write this post out of exhausted frustration as my eyes burn… the sun isn’t even down and I’m so beat I just want to sleep.
I tell anyone entering the job market or is a young professional that absolutely no job is worth losing yourself over. Your skills change over time and will never leave you completely. I’m a competent designer, a reasonable developer but the most marketable skill that I didn’t actually develop until my late 20’s was soft skills—mostly developed by gently explaining to tech illiterate coworkers why what they wanted developed was impossible, impractical or just a bad idea.
I did this by treating every coworker as if they were the client. Be polite, professional and let them know that you want to solve their problems. It’s sounds stupid but people just put their guard down if you lead with, “I’m here to help you”. You can then have more honest conversation about all the bullshit keeping you from doing your job, provided it’s phrased as matter of fact and sprinkle in niceties.
The cruel irony is that this same disposition that started as a way to make me a more effective developer ended up pushing me into a position where I don’t get time to develop.
Well, one thing I do have going for me is that everyone I work with seems to talk me up to management, otherwise I have a feeling I’d already have been removed from this team and moved back to in-company-work. I just can’t seem to translate that to getting points.
Everyone likes working with me, but sometimes I can’t work out what I’m even contributing. If that makes sense… I just wrote it and it barely makes sense to me… just working through this one bite at a time so take this post as “thinking out loud”.
If others sing your praises, then you’re golden. To this day, I despise performance reviews and dread them every year and yet, every year they’re glowing reviews from my peers.
Being high-functioning often means you’re blind to your own contributions and more critical of your own work than others perceive. In time, I learned to accept the praise from others and blindly trust that things are ok even when every fiber of my being says I’m fucking up.
Sounds like you need validation more than anything. The points are bullshit if they don’t reflect the effort. Unfortunately, the corporate world is full of bullshit metrics to gauge productivity. I felt this at the bottom and nothing changed moving into “senior leadership”. It’s all bullshit and I encourage everyone to collect a paycheck and just go home.
