Being swamped is normal and not impressive
I have worked at both startups and tech companies 40+ years old, and the conclusion I've come to from my anecdata is that every engineer at every company is swamped all the time.<p>Feature requests and bug reports are easy. Writing features and fixing bugs is hard. Your todo list will always grow faster than you can tackle items. Once a senior engineer retired, and I inherited about a hundred of his bugs out of the 600 or so he left behind.<p>It's a marathon, not a sprint. Working at a consistent pace is better than burning yourself out. The work is omnipresent. It will never stop growing. It will consume all if you let it.<p>Unless you're at an early-stage startup, let your manager deal with your giant and ever-growing todo list. Let someone more plugged-in to the business side deal with prioritizing, and focus on technical excellence. Unless you aspire to management yourself, that's already plenty to do.<p>Anyone who tells you every engineer needs to be in touch with every business concern either only works on early-stage projects or is part of a hustle culture that I don't ascribe to. I don't have the energy for technical excellence and knowing everything about the business.