Everything is "critical priority" all the time. Every new project is the most important project in the entire company. Every request that comes in has to be handled immediately. I have a good manager now who fights back against the deluge of critical work, but for my first year in my job I had a different manager who would bend over backwards to appease everybody, over-promising constantly.

I eventually started asking questions like "Which project are we de-prioritizing to accommodate this?" or "Is X more or less important than Y?" and then I would focus entirely on whichever project he identified as being the most important, and not touch anything else until I was done. Basically forcing him to prioritize our work.

I almost quit over a few of these issues, but I stuck it out and eventually our team came under new management, and now our manager is the one asking those questions instead of me. As she should be. Her favorite response when someone says a task is critical is "How critical? How much money will the company lose per day if this is late?"

Most of the time, the answer is somewhere in the range of "nothing" until a couple months after the deadline. So we set a much later deadline and get the work done right.

When an application has tons of security holes and fixes never make it into sprint prioritization because "they're not new features"

How to waste money as a dev company, 101:

Give people ton of budget for their education to do whatever they want with it with no oversight at all:
1) Devs go to some shitty confs in places across the world that teaches them nothing (new) so they can visit interesting places on company's money
2) Go to a conf where you learn ton of stuff that can be implemented right away

...Then you come back, no time to do stuff properly, just "make it work" (or make it seem like it works), because of deadlines, poor prioritization, new features, bad planning, vague roadmap and poor client management. And the worst of them all, LGTM code reviews.

Few months later, who the fuck wrote this shit? Oh, dude that left? What about this mess? Oh, he's a goner too. What the fuck should this random undocumented chunk of code do?!

Do that a few times and you've got bunch of pissed off clients with a ton of bug reports nobody can solve without wasting 20x the amount of time it would originally take.. LGTM

RIP project.

For skilled mid-career engineers, dynamic programming problems, np-complete bar raisers.

For new engineers, simple questions that can't be taught in school (questions that require business prioritization)

For older engineers, questions they haven't done since college (big-O, writing algorithms from memory)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

*rewrites rust mpsc*

you did it wroooong

I thought my threads were locking if I had thousands of jobs spawning thousands of more jobs. turns out it's fine. actually if I organize my data locks in the way everyone wants to do them my CPU fans go off but my original way you don't feel jack shit and processes faster

turns out it's because 320k jobs is a bit much for mpsc. because my jobs can spawn more jobs the whole thing just grinds to a halt. and there's sync-mpsc which allows you to have a maximum number of data you send through it, therefore I can just have 245 sent jobs instead of 320k but then this locks all the threads because for a thread to finish it needs to finish sending jobs, but a sync mpsc won't let you send a job if current jobs are over the specified limit. so all the threads get stuck sending jobs. smart. not. what's even the point of that?!

and evidently there's no built-in way to prioritize certain jobs. the AI thinks you should just send jobs in and each thread should have a priority queue. I don't know sounds dumb to me. then you could by random luck have threads with lots of jobs that need to be prioritized to be done and other threads stuck hanging waiting for previous jobs / the other threads. no thanks

so clearly the solution is to rewrite mpsc but allow prioritization when a thread goes in to ask for a job to do

since my jobs are intended to start other jobs, it makes sense to have no actual upper bound limit to the number of jobs in the queue but to favour doing jobs that won't start new jobs to lower the RAM and compute necessary to juggle all this

hope this is the actual problem. cuz the code works for like 200 jobs spawning 500 jobs each, which is 100k jobs total
but it stalls to a halt doing 8300 jobs spawning 500 jobs each (which if I do the math -- in my tests it stalls at 320k jobs and seems the number should be 4,150,00 jobs -- yeah I think this is probably the damned problem)

How I try to stay productive:

I seem to be slightly less distracted if there are other people around me. Probably because I have to make an effort to focus, which stops a part of me secretly searching for distractions when there are parts of work that I would rather avoid (like googling error messages). So I used to spend some time of the day in a café or in our family kitchen.

Taking breaks an going for a walk, preferably in the forest (when I work from home).

Prioritization of tasks also helps to focus and do one thing after the other. That said, sometimes it inspires me to do more than one task at a time.

Writing down what I did and want to do (in an actual note book on paper) helps me start a new work day, especially after a weekend off.

My team is pretty small right now. It's myself and two other guys. One lead, who's been here for five years. A senior who we brought on 2 weeks ago. And me, a regular app dev. The lead put his two weeks in last week and has been trying to brain dump as much as he can onto us.

I've been building a list of prioritization to compensate for when he leaves based on what he was saying was the most important. This list has gotten pretty massive after reviewing most of the processes in place.

I was hired mainly to quell new requests coming in and not to maintain our systems, so that's what I did. I didn't examine our prod code base too closely. I wish I had. It's in a sorry state. I'm pretty sure I have about 2 years of tech debt for a crew of two guys constantly working on it.

I've been trying to prioritize based on what gets the most bug fixes and change requests. These apps will see the biggest changes and will undergo the most maintenance.

Since I'm just a regular app dev it feels weird trying to come up with this and try to prioritize this and come up with a plan. It feels like someone else should have. If it needs done then I guess it needs done. I need to be able to collaborate and work with my co worker and be able to plan for what projects are coming next.

If anyone has any suggestions to tackle tech debt please make them. Or if there's any help for managing priorities in a different manner that may prove helpful I'm open. Honestly, I don't want to tackle this completely blind, it feels like a lot.