Sunil Pai’s suggestion for senior engineers:
I think in moments like this, the thing you need to do is actually a little counterintuitive. but you have to start from a position of assuming that everyone around you is operating in good faith, okay? like, they hired you for you. they didn’t hire you for who you think you’re going to be in six months. they like you for who you are right now, bro.
so the thing to do is actually to drop a level. not to try to be a higher-level engineer, but to almost drop a level and simply become the greatest teammate for a while. you’re still responsible for your work, you’re just trying to get moving again. you know, “I’m just here to help and support my teammates. I’m going to do bugs, the annoying things on somebody else’s plate or that no one has been able to get to. do grunt work, organizational stuff, write-ups. just things to help people out.”
and the reason you want to do this is you want to move away from an outcome-based mindset to momentum-based. like, you want to build a routine, because momentum is everything in this, and relationships are an even bigger thing in this. and by getting momentum going and fixing your relationships with other people, the thing you get is stamina. and that’s when you realize the real lesson, which is that big projects are not done with big efforts. it’s a big marathon, just slow, steady, incremental work. forget about a weekly basis, like a daily basis, an hourly basis, to the point that it’s muscle memory.
you’re in automatic mode. you wake up, you make yourself coffee, you get to work, and you just do the work. and then 30 days later, you look back and you see the immense volume of work that you’ve done just by doing a little bit every day. because the thing you’re going for is reliability, fixing your relationships. you want to take the burden off your teammates and your manager, because then, once you build that trust, they will give you bigger work. that’s the move here.
remember, you are in the reputation-building business, and software is actually downstream of that. godspeed and best of luck.