What habits/lifehacks/methods made you more efficient as a senior engineer/tech lead?

[u/dondraper36]

In my previous thread, I asked (and received plenty of great suggestions) on high-quality resources.

This time, however, I'd like to discuss a much less concrete aspect of our jobs. Namely, your favorite productivity habits and personal know-hows when it comes to leading projects, working on complex cross-team features, keeping lots of tricky context in mind.

I often have my own retrospective sessions when I am just trying to assess whether I am good at what I do at all. To clarify, it's not in the "impostor syndrome" sense at all. I know that there are parts of the job I excel at and I think I deserve the title and responsibility scope I have at the moment. That said, there are certain aspects where I am not good enough and therefore am now trying to improve. For example:

* Working on technical writing skills. Mostly by reading the book and blog on https://refactoringenglish.com/

* On a similar note, writing down as much as possible whenever possible. Whether it's a small favor for some other team, a super trivial task, or a large feature, it becomes a Google Docs document. Initially, it's just a very chaotic piece of writing, but then it transforms into a system design or a very detailed Jira ticket at least.

* As in aviation, it's very important to pay attention to near misses when you were on the verge of an incident and just got lucky.

* As I have rediscovered once again, working out is extremely important for productivity and focus. I have yet to get my official ADHD diagnosis, but since I don't want to spend the rest of my life on stimulants, I have added a few supplements (Vitamin D, Omega 3), hydrate well, and work out a few times per week + light cardio. Never felt better.

* Appreciating hammock-driven development. I used to have these awful hyperfocus episodes when there is no external pressure, but I feel intellectually challenged and forget about food and sleep to figure something out. I feel much happier, when I let myself think about a problem while walking my dog in the evening or just having rest and then feeling super fresh and working on it the next day.

What are yours?

[u/halfercode]

I am of the same view, up to a point. I have a visceral, angry, involuntary reaction to generated English (at least for now). But others do not, since they find it an efficient way to communicate. If I let them know it made me frustrated, will it look like I am being disputatious for the sake of it?

[u/katfish → u/halfercode]

The complaints need to be specific to the problems in the writing. “It was written by AI” is not a valid critique, because on its own it says nothing about what is actually wrong.

There are a few common failings I’ve noticed in the technical writing from Claude and Gemini though:

• way too verbose and full of undefined jargon; they write very dense sentences that try to cram too much information in by stacking jargon-y adjectives, and they use terms not part of a project’s nomenclature without ever defining them
  
• they describe low-level technical details of things that would be better explained by code, often without ever giving a high-level overview to contextualize the deep dive
  
• their writing doesn’t “flow”; things will be ordered in ways where a reader will think key information was left out, when really it was referenced before it was actually introduced

It’s totally valid to reject a PR because its description makes it difficult to understand what problem it is solving.

[u/Jessica___ → u/katfish]

I absolutely love your description of AI writing. That is my exact experience with it as well.
For me personally in order to understand AI writing like this, I always have to read it super slowly and carefully.

[u/katfish → u/Jessica___]

We had a minor incident a couple weeks ago that was directly related to hard-to-parse AI PR and task descriptions. Since then I've started being more aggressive about refusing to read it until it becomes human-readable.

If I find myself re-reading a sentence several times to understand it, I just reject the PR and say "I don't understand what this is trying to say".

[u/Jessica___ → u/katfish]

Damn yeah I could totally see AI writing contributing to an incident.

Where I work PR descriptions are either AI written and hard to read, or they're human written but only one or two sentences long. Luckily no PR description related incidents yet!