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?

  • Max-P
    7•9 months ago

    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.

    • Max-P
      4•9 months ago

      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.