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I graduated university last spring, and I started as a software engineer a few months after that. I felt like I’ve settled into my job and I mostly like my team. I’ve been learning a lot, and I truly felt like I was pulling my weight on the team. Then I recently had a performance review where I was surprised to learn that my manager thinks I’m slow. He specifically said “needs to pick up the speed of their execution.” I’m not lazy by any definition of the word. I’m submitting code every week. What’s normal for execution speed? I hate that I’m falling behind.
First things first: I’ve seen this feedback for new grads loads of times, and I think the feedback could be true, but that’s not really the point. It’s definitely not *useful* in its current form. You’re looking at glitter. You need more information to turn this feedback into the gold that will make you better at your job.
“Normal” will always be a moving target. That’s going to depend on each team, the state of the project, and the kinds of goals at play. Teams with higher levels of engineering skill tend to have faster delivery because they have high fidelity automated testing they can all trust, they have good code review systems, and they can test in environments very similar to production. When they do push to production, it’s usually automated releases that progressively roll out to customers where possible, with automated monitoring/alerting, and ideally automated rollbacks. Those teams absolutely exist, but I don’t think they’re as common as the industry wants to believe. When they do, it’s pretty incredible watch them work. To find your team’s normal, look up other people’s commits or merges per week. Take a look at the number of tickets they close. Remember that folks who have been there longer than you or are more senior than you probably should be closing harder tickets more quickly, so take it with a grain of salt. There’s no magic number here; you’re looking at the general trend.
If you’re on a team that doesn’t have that kind of continuous integration and delivery pipeline, there are a lot of places to inspect here. When I’ve had junior engineers who are slow to get code reviews across the finish line, it’s usually useful to look at the full software development life cycle and see where things are breaking down. It doesn’t sound like your manager helped you find the actionable pieces here, so it’s probably missing on Specific and Actionable, even if he hit on timely and kind (though that’s not guaranteed from your question). Here are the questions or topic I’d take to your next 1:1 to figure out where you can do better here and identify if you need your manager’s help changing larger systems that are holding you back.
Design
Does your team use software design documents? If yes, are you spending too long making the document perfect before sending it out for review, causing a delay in feedback? If not, would you benefit from this kind of process before you jump into coding work to stop you from chasing paths or ideas that don’t pan out?
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