Ask HN: How do I keep up with work?
12 points by JohnBrookz 6 days ago | 24 comments
Hey guys
I’m having a hard time keeping up with expectations at my job. I’ve been at a company for 3 years and last year we had a new manager who started keeping metrics.
Some of the metrics include how fast turn around times are and comments on MRs.
Our tickets are expected to be done in 3 days and we don’t do sizing or anything. We manage about 10 services not including the infrastructure which we also manage.
I also get a lot of comments on my MRs about minor issues like spacing or formatting which only my tech lead cares about. Unfortunately my manager considered this as a bad thing.
We do everything from infrastructure to front end. This year my fiancé has been sick and I’ve kind of been unable to keep up with expectations. I’m considered a low performer along with 3/4ths of my team. We’re a 4 man engineering team.
It seems like I can’t reasonably meet expectations but the job market is so bad I don’t think I’d survive.
I have a small software company I built for fun with 4,000 users but it’s not making money for me to live on.
Is it even possible to get a job without a referral in this market? I plan on riding it out until I get fired or the market gets better (it won’t). Are these expectations unrealistic?
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codingdave 5 days ago | next |
It sounds like you already know the problems to be fixed, so you need to talk to your lead and manager in order to fix them:
1) Use a linter and stop discussing spacing and formatting.
2) Start sizing tickets... or stop an unreasonable expectation of the same delivery for different scopes.
These are standard discussions that most teams sort out early on in a project. So maybe another way to look at this is that you have one underlying problem - you never communicated as a team to agree upon expectations. A 4 person team is way too small to be having these kinds of conflicts, so I'd work on improving communications and helping everyone get to a healthier place.