DEV Community: Michael Strutt

Why you should never stop asking for help at work

Michael Strutt — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 10:13:25 +0000

There’s a pattern I’ve observed through my time as an engineer and a manager. As someone progresses through their career, the amount they ask for help from others follows a u-curve, and takes a significant dip around the mid-level portion of their career. If left unchecked, that lack of support and collaboration can slow down their growth, cause a lot of unnecessary stress, and lower the quality of their work. This is something which then needs to be unlearned as the person continues to grow on to a more senior level.

It’s a phenomenon I’ve seen play out repeatedly, and probably one I went through myself at some point. In this post I’ll talk through the five distinct phases of this curve, what I believe is causing it, the impact that being at the bottom of the curve has, and how we can flatten the curve in order to reduce that impact. While predominantly I have looked at this through the lens of engineering, it’s something I’ve noticed and discussed with people from other disciplines, and I believe it applies far more widely - including beyond the workplace.

1. Starting out - asking lots of questions

I think this is the bit we all understand. When you’re new to something - be it a new role, or an entirely new field - you’re not expected to know how to do everything. It’s expected that you’ll ask a lot of questions, it’s part of how you learn.

When you’re new to something, you’re not expected to know how to do everything

It’s not a completely universal thing of course. The amount of help asked for will vary from person-to-person. Some will start out asking for help as soon as they encounter something unknown and will benefit from the support and encouragement to have a go first and make some mistakes along the way to help with their learning. There will also be those who feel guilty asking for help and will benefit from being reassured that it’s okay to ask for help and that the people around them are more than willing to offer it. On the whole though, it’s a widely understood concept that when you’re relatively new to something, you’ll be asking plenty of questions.

2. The first taste of independence

As you grow, you begin to feel more capable. You find yourself able to figure out tasks without needing to ask for so much help. Sure you might be slower than someone more experienced doing the work – and it may not even be the best way to do things – but nobody expects that, and you’re figuring things out on your own. You may still ask for feedback at some key points along the way to adjust what you’re doing and course correct as needed. But generally in this phase, you’re not asking as many questions as when you started out.

Unfortunately this is where the problem begins. The correlation of gaining experience and asking for help a little less can set up the false narrative that from this point forward, progress means asking for less help, and the belief that you will ask fewer questions once you “know what to do”. This can be compounded by the belief that the best way to demonstrate your competence as you progress is by showing that you can do things without asking for help at all. People will try to figure everything out on their own in order to show how capable and experienced they are.

3. Mid-career crisis

By this point you’re around the transition from mid-level to senior. If left unchecked, the false narrative that began in the previous phase has bloomed to the point where a person may be trying to demonstrate their seniority by working “autonomously” in a silo. They will be susceptible to all sorts of things like getting drawn down rabbit holes, getting stuck on a task and staying stuck, generally slowing down their rate of growth, or even overworking and burning out in an attempt to demonstrate their competence. It’s certainly not good for the individual in this phase, and it’s not good for the teams and projects they’re a part of either.

A lot of the time, they have been set up to fail in this way without knowing it

I want to be really clear here, I’m not blaming the individual who is in this phase. A lot of the time, they have been set up to fail in this way without knowing it. There might be a Career Progression Framework where you work. Maybe there’re just some rough job descriptions for the midweight and senior positions. I’d wager that somewhere in that wording, the more senior roles or levels are being described using words like “independently” and “autonomously”. The more junior roles and levels likely have wording to the effect of completing tasks “with support”, which is then removed at higher levels. Without the proper explanation, this all feeds into the false narrative that ability is demonstrated by not asking for help.

There’s also the problem of visibility, which I’ll talk about more in a later section. But generally feeding into this false narrative of senior people not asking for help is a lack of visibility or involvement in just how much senior people actually ask for help.

4. Relearning the value of asking

As you continue to grow, you’ll make it through the mid-career crisis phase, and you start asking questions again. Maybe it’s with the guidance of someone more experienced who's been through this before, or maybe it’s come from feeling more secure in your abilities and naturally regaining the confidence to ask more questions. However it begins, you eventually get to a point where you’re asking about as many questions as you did at the start - what changes is how and why you ask them. Generally speaking, more senior people don’t ask fewer questions, they ask better questions.

You’re asking about as many questions as you did at the start - what changes is how and why you ask them

Better questions can take many forms: it might be knowing the right subject matter expert to ask directly about a given problem; it might be asking a question with more context about the issue being experienced, instead of a more general “it’s not working” request for help.

Over time a more experienced person will have learned roughly how much time it’s worth spending on a given problem before asking a question - they won’t scratch their head for days in isolation over a problem someone else might have solved before, but they also will still spend some time exploring a problem in order to ask with more context if they don’t find a solution on their own. Exactly how much time is a judgement call that gets easier with experience.

A common example that I see of this is people asking in Slack something like “has anyone run into problem X before and can point me towards a solution, or should I carry on digging?”

Even more reasons to ask for help

It’s in this phase and the next that you learn there are reasons to ask for help and input from others beyond simply being stuck. There are many reasons, but I’ll go over a couple of the main ones here.

Two heads are better than one. Any idea worked on by two people will ultimately be a better idea than what either of the two people could have come up with independently. Even if a senior engineer comes up with a solution independently, they will ask for some else’s input (or help) before taking it further. Ultimately when and how will vary depending on the size of the task, but essentially this is the same reason we have code reviews on all tickets as the standard workflow in the industry. It’s not like senior engineers stop receiving code reviews because they “don’t need help anymore”.

Formulating ideas is part of the learning process and discussing them with others even more so

To generate ideas. In a group setting, if the most experienced member of the group begins by putting forward their idea, at least one of two things are going to happen. One, people will rally around that idea, mainly because of the weight of authority and confidence that comes with it. Two, the others in the group won't go through the full process of formulating their own ideas. Formulating ideas is part of the learning process and discussing them with others even more so. A more considered approach would be for the more experienced person to share their idea last, giving others a chance to think things through and discuss their ideas first. Better still they could ask a series of questions (again, asking for help and input from others) to prompt discussion and generate ideas within the group before even beginning to refine their own, knowing that the group ideation will likely come up with approaches they wouldn't have considered.

Building a shared understanding. When everyone in a team is aligned on a shared understanding of what they are doing and why, the team works far more effectively as a unit – the risk of overlap, redundancy, or misunderstanding is drastically reduced, and team members feel empowered and connected. One of the best ways to build a shared understanding within a team is to ask questions. Ask someone else to explain their understanding of things to you. Play back how you understand things to be, or what you just heard from someone, and ask if you are in alignment. Ask for rationale to be explained, even when you think it is clear, but especially when you don't - either you'll ensure that everyone is on the same page, or you'll identify something that doesn't make sense before you get any further.

5. Asking is a super power

To anyone who is in one of the earlier phases, or who doesn’t believe in senior people asking for help just as much as junior people – in an effort to correct this false narrative – the best evidence I can give is in the form of a story. While this definitely applies more broadly than just the scope of engineering, the best example I have of this final phase is a very senior engineer I know with a super power for asking for help.

The Eve Effect

I used to work with an excellent engineer, for the sake of this story, we'll call her Eve. Eve was widely respected for her abilities. If you'd have run a survey on who the best engineer in the company was, there would only be votes for Eve and one other person. That other person would have voted for Eve.

I was Eve's manager for a time. In her performance reviews there were several people who wrote things like "the best engineer I've ever worked with" or say how they simply felt reassured by having Eve on their team. While this feedback was positive and flattering, it wasn’t particularly helpful. There wasn’t any specific feedback about what Eve was actually doing so effectively. There were no tangible actions she could learn from or build on. There was even concern that it was more of a placebo effect or a self fulfilling prophecy where things went well because people thought they would once Eve joined the project. So I did some digging to ask the people who’d left such positive feedback, just what it was that Eve was doing. The number one thing they came back to me with, was asking questions.

Eve has the confidence to ask the important questions

When Eve joins a project, she asks questions. Questions about the way things are done. Questions when she doesn't understand the rationale behind something. Eve will ask someone to explain what's being done and why - what problem is it solving. She doesn't do this because she thinks something is necessarily wrong, and it's not done in a challenging way either. Eve asks because she's seeking to further her own understanding. But through this, others in the team further their own understanding, a shared confidence is built in the team, and often an assumption is revealed, that everyone else was working under, that doesn't actually make sense. The team is able to pivot, find a better or simpler solution before getting too far into the build. All this, because Eve has the confidence to ask the important questions.

Once we realised this, Eve was able to take this even further. She began asking these questions more consciously and in more situations. In the next review her feedback was even more positive. Eve is commonly regarded as one of, if not the most senior, most experienced and most competent engineers in the company. One of the key factors in that is because she asks for help and input from others more often than almost any other engineer I’ve worked with.

How can we flatten the curve?

The closer we can get this curve to a straight line the better. In reality I think there will always be a bit of a dip in the middle, but with some help we can prevent it from dipping too far.

As an individual - making a difference

If you're at the more junior end of the spectrum, you probably have the easiest part to play in all of this, and certainly the least responsibility. It is both expected and understood that you will have a lot of questions to ask. The real difficulty comes as you begin to progress to the later stages.

How can you demonstrate your growth and competence while still receiving support?

If you're in or approaching the mid-career crisis phase, then you've probably got the hardest job. The mindset shift isn’t an easy one. Hopefully this article and my story about Eve has helped a bit. My best advice for you would be to try and have an honest conversation with your boss or manager about how you can demonstrate your growth and competence while still receiving support. Agree with them or others higher up in your department what support looks like for you and how and when you might want it (this is good to do wherever you are). You may be in the unfortunate position where the higher-ups aren't aware of how they've set you up to fail. Some education might be in order. They may even be going through their own version of this curve in their role as a manager or leader. This article might be helpful to them too.

If you're in a senior position in your field, you have the most potential to be able to improve things. The biggest impact you can have is by leading by example – show that senior people still ask for help and ask lots of questions – be more Eve. Consider where you ask your questions. If you generally ask individuals directly, consider if some of those questions could be asked somewhere more visible to others – could you even ask someone more junior for help directly? Not only does this help to demonstrate that experienced people ask questions, but it also allows more people to learn from the answers. Consider the way you ask. I saw a trend for a little while of engineers asking questions on slack prefixed with things like "newbie question:" – I know it wasn't ill-intentioned but it creates a negative tone around asking questions, or furthers the narrative that asking questions is only something the less experienced people do. Remind people that there's no such thing as a silly question.

The biggest impact you can have is by leading by example

Finally, if you're in a position where you're able to influence what goes into the career progression framework or job descriptions at your workplace, consider some alternatives to words like "independent" and "autonomous" that better describe the traits of competence that you're actually looking for. I know it's not an easy task writing these, but it could help prevent some much bigger headaches down the line. At the very least talk to people and try to be clear about what you expect from them and have that same conversation to build a mutual understanding of what support means, when it's needed, and most importantly: make it clear that asking for support doesn’t demonstrate a lack of competence.

As an organisation - creating a better culture

I’d like to tell you that I have the silver bullet here, the way to turn this around across an entire company. But it’s not something I’ve managed – yet – and it’s not something that can be changed by an individual. I’ve done some extra reading on how to build a company culture that celebrates asking questions and asking for help – I’d encourage you to do the same. I’ll summarise what I’ve read as it very much aligns with what I’ve experienced and the changes I’ve tried to make.

It has to come from the top. Building a company culture that supports the behaviours you want to see requires intentional action. The best way to promote desired values and behaviours is for leadership to embody them. It’s going to require some vulnerability from leadership, and it’s likely going to feel a little uncomfortable at times – but uncomfortable is where growth and change comes from.

The best way to promote desired values and behaviours is for leadership to embody them

Actions speak louder than words. If leadership is only telling people “it’s good to ask for help”, but the people in leadership themselves work independently and never visibly ask for help – they’re sending a very mixed message. Their behaviour is contradicting what they’re saying, and sending a powerful message that the most experienced and senior people in the company don’t ask for help. Anyone wishing to demonstrate their abilities will likely look to follow leadership’s example. I emphasise the word “visibly” in this point because it’s a really important part of the equation. If one person in leadership asks another person in leadership for help behind closed doors, then the perception to the rest of the company is that it didn’t happen. This holds true for so many aspects of leadership that I could probably write a whole entire article about it. For leadership to really embody the culture they want and demonstrate this to the rest of the company, people need to see it happening.

Choose your language consciously. I’m a big fan of the power of language and what we communicate subconsciously with our choice of words. It’s a whole complicated topic, but some of it is really simple. The next time someone asks you for help, try saying something like "that's a great question" or "I'm glad you asked me that" before responding. Provide some reassurance for those who seem unsure by reminding them there’s “no such thing as a silly question” or that you’re “always happy to help”. More junior people may not even realise that helping them is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable parts of the job for you (at least it is for me) so let them know!

There's no such thing as a silly question

Celebrate the things you want people to do more of. What do we generally celebrate or even reward at companies? Hitting deadlines, making the client happy, launching something, going “above and beyond” and probably even some less healthy behaviours. So why not celebrate the behaviours you’d like to see instead? It might feel a little strange at first, but you could reward something like a “question of the week” at work. If you think about a conference you’ve been to, there’s quite often something like a reward for the best question given out or some kind of token freebie for asking a question. They do this to encourage and reward asking questions. When, as you usually might, you celebrate someone who has helped out another team in some way – why not celebrate the person who identified and raised the need for help too? It might feel a little odd, but both of these were valuable actions that led to the success of a project. Both of them want to be encouraged, right?

The most important thing you can do is help someone else. If you look at your todo list for the day, and one of those things is helping someone – that’s your number one priority. If you get half way through your list, later in the day, and someone asks you for help – you’ve got yourself a new priority task. This isn’t about people pleasing, or selflessly putting others first, it’s just good business sense. If you aren’t currently fighting a fire (literally or figuratively) then spending time prioritising something other than someone who needs help, firstly, wastes their time while they wait but more importantly it sends the message that helping others is less important, and maybe it’s not okay to ask for help. If you find your day begins with a string of going from one person to the next answering questions and giving help, and not getting to your individual work until the afternoon – firstly kudos, you’re clearly doing something right – but the problem here isn’t that so many people need help, or that you’re prioritising helping others over you own work. This indicates a much larger cultural problem at an organisation where people believe they only have a few people they can turn to when they need help. If there were more people readily available to support, if it was more culturally acceptable to ask for help, then each person offering support would have less asked of them.

Persevere. Nothing will ever be fixed with a single webinar. The culture of a company is not going to change overnight, especially if a conflicting message had been ingrained (intentionally or not) in the previous company culture. But stick with it, be clear, consistent and demonstrate the new values and change will come.

Closing thoughts

I have written this article through the lens of “at work”, but this phenomenon applies far more broadly than that. There is a common societal misconception that asking for help is a sign of weakness. It is not. Asking for help is an act of courage and it takes great strength to do. Identifying when you might benefit from help and speaking up at the right time is a real skill. It's one I'm still working on, and I encourage you to work on it too.

Asking for help is an act of courage and it takes great strength to do

Sidenote: I asked for help from several people while working on this article. The finished product is much better for it. I consider myself to be a better writer for their input.

Why I don't work Wednesdays anymore

Michael Strutt — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 10:22:04 +0000

Making the decision to work part-time in my early thirties may well be the best decision I’ve ever made.

As I write this article, I’m 31 years old. I’m not married. I don’t have kids, or anyone who’s dependent on me in any way. I’m not studying for a new qualification, or any of the other classic reasons to work part-time. For me that’s precisely why it’s the perfect time to start this new chapter in my life.

A caveat: I recognise that I work in a well-paid industry, and what I’m talking about in this article may not work for everyone.

How I arrived at this decision

I’ve liked the idea of working part time for many years. The issue I’ve struggled with in the past, is having to take a pay cut to do it. The importance of money had always been right at the forefront of my mind. But what I came to realise more recently, is that it’s not really as important to me as I thought (which is a complicated enough story to form its own post some time probably).

When I reflected on my career, while I had placed a lot of importance on the size paycheck, when I really thought about it, it hadn’t been my main motivation. In my early career, what mattered more to me than anything else was the people. People to get along with, to learn from and to help me grow. Many of these became my close friends. Later as I moved into a leadership position, the importance shifted to good people to teach in a company that cares about its employees. A company with a relaxed culture that respects me and affords me a great deal of flexibility.

As I thought about it more, I had always been protective about my time and peace of mind too. I didn’t go in for freelancing or side work in the evenings and weekends, like some of my friends. I didn’t go into the more stressful or risky tech sectors (like fin-tech or start-ups) that demand more from you, but pay a higher wage.

As strange as it may sound, it was only after all of this reflection that I realised my wellbeing, health and happiness are all way more important to me than money (and always have been). I realised that this focus I’ve had on working towards a comfortable retirement meant sometimes I’d forgotten to live and look after myself along the way. Throughout my career, I’ve clearly been making decisions (sometimes subconsciously) to maintain a certain level of work-life balance. So why not adjust that dial more in favour of life?

Why the perfect time is right now

Recently, I’ve found myself in a fairly new situation in my career. I found that I’m not getting the same sense of satisfaction out of individual contributor work that I used to. I came to realise that mentoring and helping others work through problems and find direction in their careers was far more rewarding to me than the other aspects of my role. The side that had delighted me for years prior.

I’ve also grown a lot since I started therapy at the beginning of 2020, and as part of that I’m getting more in touch with the person I really am at my core. Some of this is resulting in a shift in my values and what’s important to me, in other cases I’m uncovering values that were guiding me all along. Having some more time to figure out how I could respond to this change, and how I might incorporate it into my career, seemed like it would be particularly helpful.

As I said at the beginning of this article, It’s the perfect time to take some more time for myself right now. I’m in a very fortunate position in life. I had a comfortable start and I’ve worked hard to get to a good position at work. I have a mortgage locked at an affordable rate. I have savings for the future that I can fall back on if really needed. I can afford to take a 20% pay cut in order to work 4 days a week, and all that really means for me financially is that I won’t put as much into savings each month.

I honestly didn’t think there would ever be a better time to give part-time working a go. So I did.

How I made the switch

The company I work for, Potato, has always allowed me a great deal of flexibility in my job. I can take as much holiday as I feel I need, adjust my working hours to fit in around the various demands of life, and more recently a whole host of other benefits.

Not that I’m looking to promote my employer on my non-working day, but I was pretty confident from the start that they’d be accommodating. We have a policy on how to make a flexible working request, which essentially boils down to filling out the right to request flexible working form from gov.uk and then sitting down with our Delivery Director to discuss how this might impact things like casting for projects and the division of my time.

It all happened quite quickly really. In the space of a couple of months it went from an initial musing I had, to my first official non-working Wednesday.

What I do with the time

One of the main things I do now is writing. This very post that you’re reading is a product of my non-working days. It has become a bit of a passion of mine. I really enjoyed sharing my story at the end of last year. I found the responses to it really encouraging, and I feel a strong sense of purpose when I see some of the impact my writing has had on others. There are more topics that I would like to cover and experiences I’d like to share, but they don’t necessarily tie in with my job. So it’s something I want to continue to pursue in my own time.

Self care. Making more time for me. I’ll follow-up with a more detailed post about how I’ve been looking after my mental health this last year, but this can take all sorts of forms: Bike rides, meditation, journaling, taking a bath or anything I find therapeutic to do, like gardening or building something out of LEGO.

As I touched on earlier, I’ve grown a lot in the last 18 months, and with that I’ve honed my values and my sense of what is fulfilling and meaningful to me. I want some time to reflect on this, and to explore what it could mean for me in terms of role direction (and maybe this is a big enough topic for an article in its own right). It’s likely that off the back of this exploration, I’ll be working with Potato to make some changes to my current role, in order to find more fulfilment at work. There’s a small chance I’ll decide to pack in the tech industry all together and go in a completely different direction. I really don’t know, but I’m excited by the possibilities, and the time I now have to explore them.

Why Wednesdays though?

I wanted to make sure that I really use this extra time to my own benefit. I was concerned that if I took it on a Monday or Friday it would feel like just an extension of the weekend. The weekend is where I have social plans, go out and about with my partner, do jobs around that house, or just sit around and play some Xbox. While more time doing any of these things would be awesome, what I really wanted was time dedicated to me. Wednesday is perfect for this. It’s in the middle of the working week, so I have more mental energy, and I'm still in a focused mindset. I haven’t yet dropped into the “switch off and relax” mindset that I aim for at the end of the working week. Nobody else I know has the day off, so I have far less chance of being interrupted or distracted. To top it all off, my working week now essentially consists of two Monday/Friday pairs.

How is it going?

Quite simply, I love it. I love having a day truly dedicated to myself. I’m looking after myself better, and I’m doing some things that I’ve wanted to for a while. Sometimes I wake up on a Wednesday thinking I have work, then get a rush of excitement when I remember I don’t. Thursdays have never felt so good either. I feel energised when I return to work, and find myself having more headspace and patience.

Some days I feel some kind of obligation to be productive, which can be both a good and a bad thing. I definitely don’t want to “waste” this extra time I’ve afforded myself. Today I had to give myself a bit of a nudge to get started writing, but I’m trying not to set unrealistic expectations. I don’t need to justify this time to anyone, and I don’t have to have any kind of an output to show. There will be some days when the most productive thing I can do for myself is simply to rest, and not begrudge myself for doing activities that may appear “unproductive”.

At work, I’ve fallen a little bit into the classic trap of trying to fit 5 days of work into the remaining 4 days, which obviously isn’t possible. But I feel that I’m far more productive on the days that I do work. While I may not be getting 100% of the things done in a week that I used to, it’s definitely not as low as 80% either, which you might expect it to be with a 20% reduction in time. On any given day, I definitely get more done than I used to. My workload is something I’m still figuring out, and will continue to look at over time. The important thing is that I’m being disciplined about my time, and not working extra hours to compensate.

Not everyone I speak to understands my decision to work part-time, and that’s okay. I was prepared for that. I’ll explain the way I see things, but if it doesn’t resonate with them, I just accept our different views. Plenty of people tell me how lucky I am, or how they wish they worked part-time, but choose to prioritise the money instead, and that’s totally okay too. I know that what I’m doing is right for me, but I’m sure it’s not right for everyone.

Sometimes, I fall back into the monetary mindset and think about how much less I’m earning. In those moments, I remind myself that “money isn’t everything”, and think about how much more valuable my wellbeing is to me.

Will it be forever?

Maybe. I hope so! I don’t have any great desire to go back to working a 40 hour, 5 day week. I’m a realist though, I understand that it’s quite likely a time will come when I go back to full-time employment for the sake of the extra 20% pay, even if just temporarily.

Given time, maybe the rest of the world will follow in the footsteps of Iceland and working 4 days a week will become the norm. I’d love to see it happen, but I think it’s a little way off yet.

For now though, I truly believe that working part-time is the best career move I’ve ever made.

One Engineer's Journey with Mental Health

Michael Strutt — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 16:30:22 +0000

My name is Michael Strutt and I have Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). I was first diagnosed in my early teens, and it has impacted my life to a greater or lesser extent at different times since then. As of January this year I have been having weekly sessions with a Therapist. In light of World Mental Health Day and the increasing spotlight that mental health has seen this year, I would like to share my story, as both a person and an Engineer.

I’m going to start with some personal history, both because I’m telling my story here and because I think it adds good context. If you want, you can skip to the part where I start talking about the industry as a whole. Or if you’re only interested in what I’m doing to manage things now, that’s cool too. For the rest of you, this is my story:

Getting in to coding

I got into building websites quite early on in life. I discovered it right at the start of high school and just got the bug. When I started out it was a great creative outlet for me, building something and seeing the results instantly. It was also a very interesting way for me to connect to the world in a way I had never experienced before. An early site I built offered solutions to common beginner problems with Ubuntu Linux. I was amazed that I could put a tutorial or the solution to a problem out there, and it would help a person I had never met living on the other side of the planet.

As I got older I started to notice the way that I felt when I coded. I could get absorbed in a way that I never found with books. I could really focus my mind on a task without it wandering. I could solve a problem and challenge myself to learn and become better. I felt calmer, accomplished and motivated. I didn’t feel the anxiety so much when I was writing code. It offered me an escape (and in a far more productive way than that time at University when I lost the best part of a month to The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion). Although I didn’t learn this until later in life, I was dealing with anxiety by engaging the logic centers of my brain in order to think more rationally and feel better. A technique often taught in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

In this post I’m going to talk a lot about some of the things that have impacted my mental health in a negative way, but I want to stress at the start that coding has had an overall incredibly positive effect for me. Some of my happiest times professionally have been when I’ve been getting stuck in and coding all day on some really challenging problems. It has continued to be a creative outlet for me. I love the satisfaction and instant gratification of typing a few lines of code and hitting refresh in the browser to see the results. The sense of accomplishment I felt when after a full day of planning and writing out about a page of trigonometry on a notepad, I finally cracked the equation of how to center an item on the page while it was adjusted to have a shrinking 3D perspective. Please try to keep this in mind as you read on.

Starting a career as an Engineer

I was in a very fortunate situation after high school. Sixth Form was an obvious choice, my parents were there to support me, and the offer I received from my first choice of University was well below the grades I was predicted to achieve. I studied Computer Science, I wanted to specialise into Web Development, but my Dad advised me to keep my options open. On my course, we were highly encouraged to do a year in industry, and again I was fortunate enough to land my first pick of positions. My outlook was really positive. I had found this thing that I loved, that I had an aptitude for, and that now somebody was prepared to pay me a salary to do. It was my dream scenario.

There was an amazing honeymoon period on that first job. I was learning every day, keeping my brain active and engaged, stretching my comfort zones by doing new things. I was very smug to be exceeding the expectations that they had for an intern and receive all of the praise that went with it. I very quickly believed that things would be like this forever. That I would continue to soar and be praised and that everyone who told me they saw me doing great things in x years time was right. I mapped out a highly ambitious (although I didn’t think that it was at the time) trajectory for myself in my head. This came back to bite me later.

Early career progression

Everyone goes through life at their own pace, and each and every one of those paces are completely fine. I write this, and logically I know that it is true, but I still struggle to fully believe it. Career progression is a big area of comparison in the industry.

Caveat: this section is written from memories that have almost certainly been recalled through a lens that favours me. I’ve tried to remove the bias towards myself as much as possible, but I’m sure there will still be some left

I’ve always been "the smart one" in my friend group growing up and at school. That experience translated into expectations of success in the workplace. I was moving from the small town to the big city where I would be recognised with titles and of course money. In my internship I was flying high on the praise of outperforming my position and people seeing great things for me. I had really high expectations of myself.

I don’t want this to sound like I’m just nursing my ego here, and I’m certainly not complaining about the very comfortable start that I had in life. I am fully aware of just how fortunate I am to have two loving and supportive parents who nurtured my abilities and provided me with a safety net to fall back on when I needed it. I know all of this. What I’m trying to say is that the reality of the situation was a really hard pill to swallow for me.

I progressed from intern to junior very quickly. I secured a job for when I graduated at the end of my internship, and they even agreed to pay me a retainer salary during my studies. I expected this trajectory to continue up, but it slowed and for a while felt like it had stopped. I stayed in that role for nearly 2 years. I became increasingly frustrated at the lack of progression, at the lack of pay increase. I watched coursemates soar and become indispensable at their startup, cashing in vast stock options at IPO or jet-setting around the world to open new offices for the company.

Meanwhile I was taking on more responsibilities, learning new frameworks and practicing new ways of working. I got to the point as a Junior Engineer where I was the unofficial manager of our intern, doing check-ins and goal setting with them, and I was front-end lead on a project for a high-profile project that had 2 seniors on the team. Rather than seeing these things for the achievements that they were, and the foundation of valuable skills that got me to where I am today, all I focused on was how I wasn’t being financially compensated for this increase in ability and responsibility, and how I wasn’t being recognised with a change in title. Why should I put in all this work when I’m being paid half as much as the people I’m teaching? Don’t get me wrong, these things are important. Everyone deserves to be fairly compensated for the work they put in. But for a time it was the be-all and end-all of my career (and, to and extent, life) satisfaction.

These 2 years had a big impact on my mental health, and in the year that followed I reached probably the lowest point that I’ve ever felt for such a period of time. I had a panic attack while out in public. Thankfully it only happened once, I’d always been able to hide them away before, but the fear of it happening again was debilitating. I was so anxious about it that I was quite literally hiding from social interaction with friends. I became very insular. I moved back in with my parents for a while (for various reasons), and tried out a course of medication that I really didn’t get on with. I felt defeated. I thought that there was no escape, and in my mind, resigned myself to feeling like this forever.

The strain of the work

The work is very mentally challenging, that’s part of what made it appeal to me, a new problem to solve every day. But at times, this gives way to some very negative feelings. How do you deal with finding a problem that you don’t seem to be able to solve? Why does everyone around me seem to be solving problems faster than me? Is this code good enough? What will the other people on my team say when I put this up for review? I’m not going to dive into imposter syndrome. It’s something that a lot of engineers have experienced at some point or another in their career, and there is already some very well written content out there that I would encourage you to read.

Further comparisons

We all know we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others. I have a quote pinned to the notice board in my bedroom that reads "the only person I am competing with, is the person I was yesterday". It’s a lovely sentiment, and one I try to keep in mind, but it’s very easy to forget in a career that seems to be set up for comparison and competition. As part of the job, you spend a lot of time looking at other people’s code. Whether it’s a code review for one of your colleagues, diving into the inner workings of a library you’re using, or simply looking for answers on StackOverflow, it will take up a significant portion of your time.

You end up seeing a lot of code that is better than yours. It can be hard to remember that this isn’t because you are objectively worse at coding than the other person. But it’s because this is what that person chose to focus on. They may have learned an entirely different set of things to you that lead them to this place, or may even have had vast amounts of help with it. You also don’t see the struggles that they went through to write this code. You only see the end results. This can be an awesome opportunity to benefit and learn from all the hard work someone else went through to get to the best result, or it can highlight to you just how much you don’t know. It took me quite a while to shift my mindset to the former, sometimes it’s still a bit of both.

Code review is a very common best practice for the industry. Most places have it as an integral part of their workflow. When I was introduced to it I found it really tough to begin with. It felt like I was pouring my heart and soul into my work and offering it up to be shot down and torn apart. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Ultimately the goal is for the best code possible to be in a project, for issues to be spotted and addressed before they make it live, and to raise the overall standard of the team. It took me longer than I would like to admit to see it this way. It was only when I stopped having my code reviewed that I realised I missed it. I wasn’t learning as fast anymore. I actively went and sought out other reviewers and ended up getting mentored by the Technical Architect at the time who didn’t even write the same language as me, but made the time for me all the same (the first of many thanks in this article goes to him). After this it became a requirement for me in all future roles, to be able to surround myself with people who knew more than I did about something so that I could learn it from them. Since then I always try to put the same effort into code reviews that I received back then, and will always take the time to explain something fully to someone who is keen to learn.

Stresses of the job

There can be a lot of time-related pressures in software engineering. Deadlines might be looming, sometimes moving closer. It can be very difficult to account for every possible thing that needs to be done to build a finished product. You can run into issues or constraints that suddenly add more to your workload, or the simplest of tasks on the surface could end up taking the longest amount of time due to hidden complexity. It can be very hard to explain all of this to someone who ultimately doesn’t really understand what it is you are doing, yet gets to have the final say in budget and timeline. It’s been this way in the industry for years. My Dad would laugh at some of my stories from my first job because of how familiar they sounded to his experiences 30 years before me.

I have on rare occasions done some crazy hours to get a project finished for the agreed launch timeline. I have started working on a launch blocker after dinner at the office, and pushed through until I had to catch the last tube home. I was then back in the office the next morning for a successful 8am launch. I’m completely okay with this. In fact I’m proud of it. But this is very much the exception and not the rule. For some this is not the case, and even for me there was a time (with a past employer) when it felt like the only reward for finishing ahead of schedule was starting the next project early, but if the timelines ever slipped it was the team’s responsibility to get things back on track by whatever means necessary.

There are a lot of things that are changing in favour of team health and reducing these kinds of pressures. From the processes we use to run projects, to the way we try to sell a team with an objective for a period of time rather than a fixed scope of delivery. Even big companies are moving the launch date of huge game releases to make sure things are done properly without putting the team through hell.

I know that I am very fortunate not to have experienced the worst of these stresses myself. I’ve heard horror stories from others in the industry (some I’ve known, some from around the world) that are far worse than anything I’ve experienced, and I count myself lucky to have had people around me a lot of the way who would fight my corner and make my well-being a priority. But even with all of this there have been times when the pressure has taken its toll on me, where I’ve felt completely overwhelmed by everything I have been juggling, and when the stress I have been feeling has resulted in some serious burn-out and even pretty serious illness.

This past Christmas, I was burning the candle at both ends pretty hard, feeling the added pressure of a new role and some pretty big shoes to fill. I was so burned out when I finally stopped and took some time off, that it was only then that my body was able to recover enough to start fighting a virus I had picked up, and I was ill for a full month. It was a real wake-up call to start making my well-being more of a priority than I had been. Also, a big thank you to the Coach at Potato who helped me slow down when I was in danger of doing this the year before when I got stressed out about all the complications in my house purchase. She made time in her busy day just to sit and listen to me and allowed me to get things off my chest and just take some time to breathe.

The mental load

Being an Engineer can both help and hinder my mind. In the same way that a really complex problem at work can be a really great thing to occupy your mind, it can also be really hard to let go. When the work you are doing is physically in the office, it’s easy to leave it behind. When the work that you are doing is happening in your mind, it’s very hard to leave that behind (something that has been exacerbated by lockdown). I have had many nights where I was laying awake problem solving, either consciously or subconsciously sifting through the details and trying to find a better way. I’ve even woken up in the night with a sudden realisation of how to re-architect something and been scrambling for pen and paper to write it down before it fades away. If this is something that happens to you, I strongly recommend keeping a pen and paper on your bedside table so you can get these things out of your head.

I very recently put a lot of work into trying to fix my sleep by following the advice of Sleepio. If you’re having trouble sleeping and are willing to make some serious adjustments to your lifestyle to improve it, then I would highly recommend their course.

Opportunities for growth

I don’t want this post to be all doom and gloom. I have a huge amount to be thankful for about my career and the industry I have chosen to work in, I really can’t see myself working in any other. There are a lot of upsides to it.

Tech industry jobs generally offer a greater degree of flexibility than jobs in other fields. You get some companies with amazing benefits packages that these days often include support for your well-being and mental health. Being entirely cloud-based and working on laptops has been extremely useful for being able to work from anywhere in the world too. Something that has been especially useful this year.

There are also a lot of opportunities to move outside of your comfort zone. Early on in my career, I challenged myself to slowly increase my confidence in being more client facing and took the opportunity to learn how to participate in, then lead, technical interviews.

I can’t say for sure how typical this is of the industry for lack of personal experience, but working at Potato really helped to normalise the idea of mental health for me. A couple of my colleagues were very open in talking about the fact that they had been to therapy at some point in their life. In the time I have been here, I’ve listened to 4 lightning talks from people about their experiences in topics such as therapy, mindfulness, meditation and personal stories with mental health. It was really eye opening for me that people talked about these things as if they were normal, because they are normal. I don’t know how much longer it would have taken me to ask for help without this experience normalising the idea for me.

A big thank you to everyone at Potato who helped change my perspective on therapy and personal development. In particular my former manager, Adam, who challenged me to confront my professional fears as well as sharing his own experiences. He also recommended to me a book that I’ve bought about 5 copies of for friends and colleagues over the past year: Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway. Quick plug for Adam’s new start-up FidlLeaf: Wellbeing + Personal Growth Platform.

My turning point

The turning point for me was public speaking. It’s something I have had a fear of for as long as I can remember. But at the same time it’s something that I have always wanted to be able to do.

There were a lot of things I knew I could do to make it easier, from how to find the right subject matter, an event with a supportive crowd and how to practice it until I was confident I could deliver. With the help of my manager at the time and one of our Coaches we broke down all the things I could do into a plan and a series of small steps to get there.

I started small, a lightning talk with one other Engineer that was mostly a demo. Then another shared talk that was more of a technical explanation. Each time these were practiced and rehearsed, they were delivered to an audience of friendly Potatoes (not literally, that’s just how we refer to ourselves at Potato) who were supportive and gave feedback when it was asked for.

The next challenge I gave myself was to take a ridiculous subject and still try to make a 5 minute solo talk about it engaging and entertaining for the audience. I delivered a lightning talk titled "Crumpets and Crumpet-Based Life Hacks" and to this day it’s probably the best received talk that I have delivered.

Finally I found a suitable event to deliver my first public talk at. Potato were hosting DJUGL’s lightning talk events, so the location and a good proportion of the audience would be familiar to me. I prepared a talk about the work experience programme we’d been running at Potato that year, why I felt it was so important, and trying to encourage other companies to give it a go. I practiced a lot (both solo and in front of others), refined it with their feedback, and got to the point where I had learned my speech off-by-heart. I knew I could do all of these things to help myself feel more prepared for it and take the edge of the anxiety. But the thing that really surprised me was that after all of this practice, I no longer felt anxious about the public speaking. I was actually excited to share what I had learned and possibly encourage others to do the same.

This is why it was such a turning point for me. I realised that I was capable, through a bit of hard work and perseverance, of no longer experiencing anxiety about something that used to cause me significant anxiety. It made therapy seem like a much more viable option for me.

Getting help

Asking for help was possibly the single hardest thing I had to do. I was in a very fortunate situation at Potato. We have access to NABS who, among a whole host of other services, offer a series of free therapy sessions to people who need it.

As part of this you have to ring up and speak to someone on the phone and explain the difficulties you’re experiencing and why you would like help with them. I have always found it difficult to talk about my anxiety. I think for me there’s a real sense of shame associated with it, and feeling like I’m failing at something that everyone else is coping fine with (which isn’t true). I get choked up and emotional when I talk about my experiences. In part I relive them as I talk, and getting choked-up for me made it even more difficult, because I was terrified of someone seeing the crack in the facade.

I’m working on this one in therapy, still. I know it’s okay to feel and to express my emotions. I’m sharing a lot more openly about it. But I notice how much my view was shaped by the world I grew up in. This bullshit concept of "big boys don’t cry" that was perpetuated in 90s pop-culture, where a man who expressed his emotions was either a woman or gay. It’s wrong on so many levels.

I hid myself away in one of our smallest meeting rooms in the office for that call, and I’m not ashamed to say that I spent the 15 minutes I had after it ended bawling my eyes out. Then composing myself so that nobody else would see. I’ll throw in a quick thank you here to the person who dropped everything they were doing to get me through that evening, and their ongoing support in my journey. I won’t name them, but it’s an easy guess.

Ongoing support at work

Talking about my mental health in a professional context felt like a really big deal at the time, but it went far more smoothly than I thought.

I spoke directly to our Tech Director and Head of People about it, and honestly the reaction was incredible (thank you Luke & Steph). They told me to make my well-being the top priority. We’d reduce my workload as needed, and I could be completely flexible with my working hours. I was given the freedom to fit my work in around the way I was feeling on any given day and take time out for my therapy sessions in the middle of the day. I was encouraged to take more breaks. We already have an uncounted paid leave policy at Potato, but being told to make more use of it really helped to eliminate any of the guilt I was feeling for taking a week off just to recharge at home without going anywhere.

I was able to do this for as long as I felt I needed to, with no pressure at all from work. I’m mostly working as normal again now, although I still finish early on Tuesdays for therapy.

What I’m doing to manage things now

I’m in a much better place than I was this time last year. I remember on the previous World Mental Health Day wanting to simply tweet out that anxiety was something I was dealing with, and even the thought of that filled me with dread at the time. Now I feel (mostly) comfortable sharing my story publicly, and more than that, I actively want to. Through sharing, I hope to be able to help others in some way, or at the very least normalise the idea of mental health a tiny bit more.

I’m still going to therapy. I started with CBT, learning some skills I can use to manage my anxiety when I experience it. Now I’m doing Psychotherapy with the same therapist to look at some of the underlying reasons that I’m experiencing it and work through them. I don’t see myself stopping this any time in the near future, and I’m totally okay with this.

I have formed a bunch of healthy habits that are helping me to manage things:

Journaling - I journal very often, most evenings. Just writing down all the things that are on my mind, challenging my overly negative thoughts and occasionally writing myself a letter as if I was talking to a close friend who was going through this (we can be way harsher to ourselves than we would be to anyone else).
Gratitude - I keep a gratitude journal. At the end of each day I try to write down 3 good things that happened, or that I’m thankful for that day. I’m up to about 700 entries now.
"Yay me" book - This is something I’ve only recently started (the name inspired by a former Coach Community Lead at Potato). Essentially I’m gathering some of the nice things or successes that either I have thought about myself or have heard from others. I’m grouping them roughly into areas (like professional, personal, relationships) so that if I’m feeling negative, I have a source of positivity to balance things out.
Exercise - I’m a big believer of "healthy body, healthy mind". I used to say that I went a little crazy if it had been more than a week without riding my bike. Last year I took up running as it’s a bit easier to fit into the day. Until I started therapy, doing some hard cardio every couple of days was my crutch. Then I got quite ill and everything fell apart. These days I try and fit in a couple of runs and a couple of workouts each week.
Mindfulness / meditation / yoga - Definitely something I’d like to do more of. I meditate only really when I want to calm down, but it’s effective. I started the 30 days of Yoga with Adriene early in lockdown but haven’t finished it yet. Mindfulness is a huge topic, but for me focusing on my breathing is really something that helps bring me back into the moment when I’m spiraling. I’m a big fan of box breathing and count out the seconds by tapping on my finger tips in turn to add extra mental focus.
Being more open - this was a tough habit to form for me. I have generally been quite guarded and have spent many years absolutely terrified of people finding out about my anxiety. But hiding it away reinforces the idea that there is something to hide, that there’s something wrong or to be ashamed of. There isn’t. I took baby steps to begin with, I would answer truthfully if directly asked. Then I made the therapy block in my calendar visible to others, I started mentioning it in conversation when relevant. Now this post. It’s something I’m still working on, but I’m really proud of the progress I’ve made.

On that last point. I want to thank the two guys at Potato who really changed my perspective on this. It was late January, we were in a coaching triad, I had just started Therapy and wasn’t in a good place at all. When I was asked how I was at the start of the session, I pretty much just broke down into tears, the mask I wore at work came off completely. They handled it really well. At the end of the session one of them commented on how they had no idea I was going through something like that. That it helped them to see that other people had bad days too, and see someone else finding things tough. It helped to normalise what they felt at times. That conversation was probably the biggest inspiration for this post.

Also, I highly recommend the free mental health chatbot app: Woebot. It encourages you to check in, teaches you about various little techniques you can use for self-care, helps you form healthy habits and generally is packed with great little bits of information and encouragement.

Wrapping up

There’s a lot more I could write in this post (there are also many more people I would like to thank), if there’s interest then I’ll gladly do a follow-up. Mainly this was an exercise for me in sharing, and reinforcing to myself that there is no shame in the journey I have gone through, that it’s nothing to hide. I tried to give it a reasonable narrative so that it flowed a bit more naturally than the jumble of thoughts that I wanted to get down. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: It’s okay not to feel okay, but you don’t have to stay feeling like that, and you are not alone.

Photo by Finn on Unsplash

GitLab Details Sidebar

Michael Strutt — Tue, 12 May 2020 10:23:53 +0000

Why and how we created the GitLab Details Sidebar extension for both Chrome and Firefox.

The issue at hand

Like many companies, at Potato we use GitLab as part of our everyday product development workflow. It’s feature-rich, open source and the team are great at taking on feedback and feature requests from the community.

It seemed however, that one area of GitLab seemed to suit the Engineer mindset much more than it suited the Product mindset. Our Product Leads had a persistent issue with the GitLab boards where they were unable to see or edit descriptions and comments of the issues directly from the board view. This was a feature that those who had previously been familiar with tools such as JIRA particularly struggled with.

We did a bit of searching around and found that this issue had already been raised. It wasn’t in a state where merge requests were being accepted, or the final direction had been decided. So we set about seeing what we could do to address the issue ourselves in as lean a way as possible. A design had already been put together on the issue in question, so we had everything we needed to jump straight into dev tools and start tinkering.

Rapid prototyping

After exploring a couple of different approaches, it became clear that the fastest way to get a feature-rich details view would be to use the details page itself, leveraging an iframe to include it into the existing sidebar. As well as being simple to execute, this would ensure that any updates to the functionality of the details page would be reflected in our extension. Then it was a case of adding a click event to listen for when an issue was clicked on, and reading the URL for the link to update the source of the iframe.

The next thing to validate was how to inject the iframe into the page of everyone who wanted it. A Chrome Extension seemed like the obvious candidate here, as most of us use Google Chrome at Potato, and they can be easily ported over to FireFox to extend the reach (and also to please our Tech Director, Luke). I hadn’t personally built a Chrome Extension before, but a quick bit of research showed that a feature called Content Scripts would give us a simple way to inject CSS and JS files onto pages that match our URL pattern.

Defining the MVP

Once we’d proved to ourselves that this was possible, and we had a sensible direction in place, we wanted to define the minimum set of requirements that would make this extension useful. The goal was to get this to real users at Potato and see if we can improve the workflow for our Product Leads. After a quick brainstorming session, the set we came up with was:

Ability to see and interact with the issue details view directly from the board
Option to toggle the expanded details view
Expanded state should persist between tickets and on reload
Users should still be able to interact with the full board in the background
Expanded view is not appropriate for small screens
Details view should have a stripped back UI to integrate better into the sidebar

Polishing up the MVP

We had a few things to do to get from the proof of concept that we were copy-pasting into the developer console to our first release candidate, some of which proved easier than others. Saving the toggled state was simple enough. The toggle relied on flipping a boolean in the code and updating some CSS classes accordingly. localStorage seemed like a good candidate for the implementation as the extension is installed at a browser level, just like the scope of localStorage. All that needed to be done to persist the state was writing the new state every time it was changed. Then on initialisation, read this value back from localStorage (converting between string and boolean).

One thing that proved more challenging was correctly handling the creation of new issues on the board. Using Mutation Observer seemed like a good fit for this, and it was a good excuse for me to try it out with a more complicated use-case. Initially this seemed really simple to filter the mutations down to the creation of new cards but there were a few edge cases. Dragging and dropping created clones of each card, but this could be fixed by tracking which issue numbers had been seen before. The final hurdle was to handle the startup when all of the issues were being added to the board asynchronously. We didn’t want this to treat each card being added to the board the same way as a new issue being created. As the cards are added all at once, a simple debouncing of the function handling new cards being added reduced the occurrences down to a single firing of the event that could be safely ignored until user interaction.

Finally, to get things ready for internal testing, we needed to create a store page, give our extension a name and capture a screenshot of the extension in action.

Internal dogfooding & finishing touches

The newly named GitLab Details Sidebar was very well received across the teams at Potato. People across the disciplines found it a useful addition to their workflow and it swiftly became the most installed internal Chrome Extension at Potato. From this use we discovered and fixed a few bugs, and got some good feedback on some potential future enhancements.

As well as offering some bug fixes, one of my colleagues made a great contribution to speed up the workflow. Using GitLab’s CI pipeline to automate the release process, uploading a zip file directly to the Chrome Web Store, then publishing the extension via the API. Now anyone in the team can release a successful commit from master without having to build anything locally.

Publish to the world

Finally we were ready to share our creation. We included a simple popup-window to show some info about the extension and link back to the issue board and the source code and then change the extension from private to public and republished.

You can find the GitLab Details Sidebar on the Chrome Web Store and on the Add-ons for Firefox site where you can install it completely free. We fully welcome any feedback or feature requests. Hopefully this extension will improve your daily workflow just as much as it has ours.