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 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.
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.
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!
