Even though my story isn’t nowhere near your situation, I can vaguely relate. To the pain you feel, but also to the strength you seem to have found, to look for the positives because, deep down, you know that being positive and embracing the situation is the best you can do for your son.

I’m sending all my love to you, your son and your family.

It's about "reputation" and about what your peers think of you. I feel that how others perceive is very important for career progression inside a company. It's common for managers to ask team mates for feedback during performance reviews. This was (and is) my fear.

My "big picture" was not so big. It's just to get enough context to do my "mundane" work well. I forgot to say that I'm only a mid-level engineer. For instance, to give good opinions/high-level solutions during ticket refinement sessions, realising when a ticket is not clearly written and things like this.

Also, there's always this debate about the level of detail that goes into a ticket. Lots of detail makes refinement sessions take ages (and they aren't the place to "solutionize".

However, tickets with fewer details (just the business outcome), can be challenging as we may not yet know all our service's logic or we may not know enough about the organisational structure of our company (for when we need to interact with other teams with different competences).

I need to staple this (or maybe the whole answer) to my wall and read it many times a day. Thanks :)

School was easier: the path is laid out for us and we just need to, more or less, follow it. At work, not so much. Everything is ill defined and you're sort of expected to "learn by osmosis" (by going to meetings, listening to your team chatting and then forming an understanding). I'm terrible at this and the consequence is that I don't always prioritise my effort and work well.

The obvious answer is to ask, but I'm not always aware of what I'm missing or the explanations come with loads of other lingo and assumptions about my current knowledge. After failing to understand an explanation, I feel I shouldn't ask again for fear being labelled "dumb" (after all, everybody else seems to be doing well). I also try to take notes, but after a while I just end up with a pile of disjoint pieces of information.

Has anyone felt like me? Have you found techniques and strategies to cope with this that you could share?

Or anything really. Points of view and opinions are very much appreciated as well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34438768

Points: 19

# Comments: 29

Also, it can sometimes be hard to create sandboxes. It's easy for Prometheus, but maybe a bit harder to AWS (I tried LocalStack before).

Nevertheless it's all good advice, thanks!

A good example is Prometheus. I struggle with their documentation, but I feel I’m missing some background knowledge as well, but I don’t even know where to get it.

Another one is AWS. I’ve tried to use AWS ECS with an EC2 launcher but I failed to do it by myself. I later found a GitHub example, but I really don’t know what I’m doing.

How do you get your work done in these situations (let’s assume the final answer is not just a couple of Google searches away)? Do you just go down the rabbit whole of whatever seems to be the required background knowledge? Is it trial-an-error? If so, how do you it’s done right and you’re not overlooking anything major when you don’t understand all the variables involved in the problem?

I hope this question isn’t too vague and you’re able to understand the kind of advice I’m chasing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33323399

Points: 5

# Comments: 5