You have two jobs (2017)
&gt; Be easy to work with.<p>I’ve been in the industry for less than 5 years, but I might be struggling with this one. I’m an IC and get so many direct requests from my manager, other managers, my team members and people from other teams. Every task I sign up for, they want timelines and status updates every week. Sometimes multiple times every week. If I only had to send out 1 status, once a week, I think I would be way more productive.<p>When I work with other managers&#x2F;teams, often scope blows up. Hey, can you fix this little thing becomes, you’ve got to build this tool that covers 24 different use cases and give us ETAs for when every single use case will be completed.<p>My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team&#x2F;manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead.<p>Sometimes I get what I call vanity projects. Projects that upper management is leading that don’t make sense (at least I’m not convinced they make sense but could be persuaded otherwise) but are there to win these people brownie points. Sometimes there’s almost an irrational push to work on these things.<p>I feel like I need to do a lot to protect my time so I can do deep work (or what’s left of it) and get the really high priority stuff done. It’s kind of exhausting, I might not be easy to work with and I wish I had more mentorship (I’ve tried to find it at work and haven’t found anything substantial).