Unproductive
Last week was a jumble of thoughts where you feel you’re not being productive enough and stop and wonder why you feel that way.
As I left the “hard skills,” like programming new features or doing tests, etc., it became easy to feel like you’re not being productive, especially as I could not measure my progress like before. One thing I return to whenever these sorts of feelings come up is the Peter Principle. Which states “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” As staff engineers, we tend to move inside-out the organization, first working with a direct team, then multiple teams, and then with an organization. As we have less direct contact with the day-to-day activities of teams, the need for soft skills becomes more prominent.
Don’t fall back
One of the first things I needed to learn with these moments when I felt unproductive was to avoid falling back into doing things that I did in my previous role.
I did it for the longest time. Whenever I felt that I wasn’t accomplishing anything, I jumped back at looking at backlogs of teams and fixing a bug here and there or even building things from scratch, like CLI tools or libraries.
While these things are helpful, in some cases, I was taking the opportunity from teams to have this learning, or in most cases. I could have yielded more impact for my current role.
It took me trial and error and being intentional and aware when this occurred.
Be Like Water
Bruce Lee famously said to “be like water”, meaning that we should adapt, learn and grow.
One of the things I was reminiscing about this past week was that being adaptable has been a skill I had to learn to serve those around me. Being adaptable meant different things in different contexts. In some cases, it came across as some teams needing someone to act as a soundboard, providing project management or product input. Adaptability, while in some cases might be a strength, in others might be a weakness because you can end up helping everyone but yourself, and if you’re doing other things, who’s doing your job?
The skills needed and the adaptability required is based on context, so be aware of your surroundings and consider that when trying to adapt to help others.
Environment Aware
While adaptability is a good skill, that or any other skill you have could also be a weakness, depending on the environment you’re working in.
When I started doing staff engineering, I used to feel as if I was met with resistance when suggesting things to be done a certain way. Over time, I realized I wasn’t offering a better way of doing something; I was telling “my way” of doing something. I had to return to the proverbial drawing board and learn about influencing others and driving change.
Managing up, influencing others, and getting better at reading my environment became excellent skills, especially in learning when to lean on my other skills to help others or improve organizational processes.
Your turn!
Have you had instances where you felt unproductive after being in a new role? How have you changed this? Let me know your comments!
Happy Coding!
website | twitter | github | linkedin | mastodon | among others