tarobun

Hey guys, I haven't posted in a while. I started using a moleskin journal and I can usually jot down a few loud thoughts there. Although I like the idea of writing often, I've been trying to balance the rest of my life first. And even then, I'm not sure whether I would write for Medium or for this blog.

Anyway, it is 7:14 a.m. and I am sleep-deprived and tired, hence why I am writing here now. My goal was to balance my life this weekend, so how did it end up like this? I should never have to stay up late or cut down on hours of sleep to get more work done, versus getting up early to swim and study a little bit or get a little bit of an early start. It feels like it deserves a post-mortem (in technical terms, though I have never written a real post-mortem so am not super familiar with the actual format). Maybe I'll write one each time it happens.

Anyway, here's what I didn't do that I needed to get up early to do:
- brainstorm ideas for my company's new teams, we're having a meeting today to kick off reorganizing our teams around core metrics
- work on a feature that was due last sprint, and some bugs from the previous sprint (bolding issue, the icon used for a notification)
[] also did not manage to swim / exercise over the weekend, was kind of hoping to yesterday
[] did not manage to make a dent in cleaning up the boxes of paperwork I have in the room, which would improve my relationship with Rachel

(What I did do:
- yesterday: watercolor in the morning, yoga, mostly study Ruby, play a bit of dappervolk, get back to people on tinder and facebook
- the previous day: spent 1/2 day in bed, having a hard time feeling motivated to get up and do anything. Rachel helped with her persistence; went to rec room and mostly dappervolked while reading a tiny bit of Active Records Associations. Went back to house due to rec room reservation & studied slowly offline, the same and a little bit about Ruby on Rails best practices. Also watched a movie at the end of the day with Mom and Rachel, East Side Sushi set locally in Oakland.
- friday: long-boarded, meet up with college friend for ayce hotpot, walked around San Mateo, quested for Dole Whip, went to the library and borrowed books. Got tired and dappervolked instead of crochet or watercolor or work or brainstorming.)

I'll admit, I am ambitious and I got a decent chunk done, thanks to the additional day I took off on Friday. But I should have had enough time yesterday to take care of work work stuff and not have to undermine myself this morning to compensate. I guess part of it is a matter of prioritization -- I wanted to get to a certain point in my Ruby studies (and didn't get there, but was satisfied with having made significant progress), but I let it stretch on for too long -- all the way to 6 or closer to 7 p.m., leaving myself tired.

A few take-aways:
- Focused energy and motivation is a limited resource that you have to build up, over time.
I thought I could work after dinner to take care of the work stuff, but "working" for a long haul - about 6 hours, even though I took it easy and had plenty of distractions, sapped up my energy and I don't fault myself for feeling like I needed to unwind and couldn't work (or even swim) much more after that. I ended up dappervolking, relaxing in bed, and reading manga.
- You tend to get sleepy and more tired after meals. It's just a pragmatic fact.
- Timeboxing things and prioritizing (hey, wanted to study Ruby a bit first? OK, 2 hours, then work since that is higher priority for at least two or so hours, and get back to studying Ruby afterwards if that's progressing fine)

I'm noticing resistance inside myself towards the third item, because I think my nature is to hate context-switching. It feels disruptive and like it breaks up my focus... but it is probably appropriate. The other reason why I resist switching to other things while I am in the middle of something is I often feel I haven't made enough progress, and that if I stop there, I probably won't get back to it and feel satisfied by how much progress I made. /:

Looking forward:
I want to leave work at work more often. I'm afraid long-term of running myself into the ground with these unhealthy work habits and burning myself out.* Studying is one thing, but I shouldn't have to work after or before work to compensate for my progress at work. It's been my goal for a while to do more hobby stuff at home, but I've noticed that in the past week or so, I usually end up staying late at work instead to try get more progress on something easy done (because I am slow and detail-oriented, and probably don't prioritize 100% correctly), then come home tired and sleep and my life isn't really that balanced in the end. I also had trouble sleeping a day or two because I would be stressed in the background, and play dappervolk at night, shining the cell phone light into my eyes.

I like watercoloring and gouache. I'd love to be able to:
- do one watercolor or gouache painting a day, after getting home before getting to bed
- if not watercolor or gouache, some other hobby like crochet or reading
- study hard-copy books (more convenient than digging out the laptop to try view downloaded documentation offline)
- washing garments and ironing other garments for the next day [... mending stuff sometime]

in the mornings:
- swim at least once per week for some fitness exercise
- longboard and roller-skate on other days with Rachel, to get better at fulfilling sport hobbies, before going to work
- shower & study or get a head start on work

in general:
- wake up earlier bit by bit in the mornings for the above goals;
- have good habits, like dental hygiene, being prepared for the next day, sleeping at a good time
- want to get back eventually to transcribing Mom's story. it will feel unfinished if I never get back around to it

An overarching problem at work is that I'm reluctant to be honest about my progress because I have an ego and don't want to admit I'm behind on a simple task because I shouldn't need help with a certain class of things.. predicaments I end up in just because I am stubborn about the way I work or what I want to get done. Also, abase your ego too often by saying you can't get stuff done or you're struggling with prioritization, and it damages your self-image and others' perception of you in the long run. A thing about avowal / disavowal. It probably easier to talk about these things with people I carefully select on a 1:1 basis. You have to carefully manage the way you express yourself and other people's perception of you.. at the same time, sometimes you just have to take a plunge.

---

Other comments:

• I seem to be mentioning vague allusions to how I feel about work and my work-life balance to people I know often, probably as a way of cementing how I feel about work and gathering feedback from people I know. But at the same time, I don't really want that much feedback. I likely won't use it. I have a thing, where I let things be, and I sort things out on my own if they need sorting out. :P It's my stubbornness again -- I approach things the way I approach them, and I have confidence in myself to handle things on my own. Anyway, I just want other people to register how I feel and maybe get and hear a little bit of their response. But it actually sounds alarm bells in other people because I express this stuff a lot, so something to be cognizant of.
• I often see posts on Twitter about making sure you get enough sleep, don't stay at work too late, etc. and like them, but it's ironic that I don't really adhere to the advice much in practice. Some posts talk about feeling this bullshit need to prove yourself in your 20s, and I think I feel that pressure in my life right now. (Proving myself as a competent and productive engineer.) I have to remember it's a marathon, not a race -- people have to accept me as I am, and help me get to where I want to be, without trying to rush things all that much.
• Related to the point above, it's BS because in the end, why are you selling your life? for work, which you pretend you care about in the moment and you do, but you don't REALLY care about in the large scheme of things. Especially when you die, and you've sold your life to someone else's prerogatives. Life is finite and time is very realistically limited. Some people live to be ambitious, have a great career and be the best or well-recognized in their field. Honestly though, while it's nice to be a good engineer and I'd like that a little bit, it's much more important to me to have enjoyed a balanced life, lived well with friends and engaged in my creative hobbies and made some things of my own that I wanted to make, than to be a really good engineer. Rather be a mediocre engineer, if necessary.

* I also don't think I do as well at work if I am often sleep-deprived and stressed.

P.S. I'm crushing a bit on a co-worker, but I don't think it's very likely anything will happen there. Maybe I'll write about it more sometime. 

[spun off from the previous post]

It was my 1-year anniversary at work at the beginning of October! Time passed by, really quickly, but it also feels like it's been a year and I've gotten to learn a bit.

Sadly my cohorts and I who were hired from the same school were holding out hope that around now we'd be renegotiating salary, since we were given low offers to start out with and more or less promised salary adjustment after one year. But since I began poking around to get input and advice from co-workers and acquaintances about this, I got hints that negotiating my salary might not go as well as I hoped.

For one, it seems like they actually plan on giving us raises in February, without a formal review process (that is the time everyone in the company normally gets raises based on their performance, and we have this so-called "continuous feedback" policy, so annual reviews are no longer standard and must be specially requested). One ray of hope is that our boss did mention that "we've learned a lot" and that "would be taken into account" when we get our raises, hopefully meaning we wouldn't be capped at the normal company-wide percentage raise limit, which would do little to address our low starting salary. Also, the "raise" is retroactive and backdated to our first year anniversary, I think, so our paychecks would do catch-up for the months between now and Feb. when the raise should have been in effect.

Still sound a little weird to you? If so, I agree. It might be normal policy for this company, but it's not a lot to raise my confidence since we had to broach the topic of our salary raise ourselves (maybe normal)-- AND ALSO the friend of our boss who helped referred us to the company said he thought it was highly unlikely we would get more than a 5k raise (this was before our boss said our growth would be taken into account). He might not be part of the company and so might not know what's really up, but this offended me. Why? Because when he referred us, he also recommended that we not negotiate our salary -- this is literally the opposite of conventional wisdom! and the normal advice he offers everyone else who was not considering an offer at this company. Seems kinda shady to me...

Anyway, the point is, this mentor advised us not to initially negotiate our salary, which supposedly was "a good offer for our level of experience" (but is relatively low for the industry in general in this high-pay area for the position's role).. but it turns out that when it came down to it, he didn't think we would be able to re-negotiate our salary significantly to adjust for our growth? That means that when he gave us that advice, he was basically telling us to resign ourselves to being undercompensated for as long as we stay at this company, unless we hold out long enough for a significant promotion and pray that it will leap up to market rate at that point. ٩(`皿´҂)ง Only he wasn't actually transparent about that at the time.

He also (when we asked him for advice about renegotiating our salary) spewed some BS about how he didn't like us focusing on pay because he feels for your first software engineering job, you should focus on doing what you love, learning the most you can, and then the money will come in naturally afterwards. He made it sound like that by being concerned about our salary and compensation in the first place, we were being too focused on pay, which is not what matters for your first job. And you know what? It's not like I totally disagree. Maybe there's some reason to that. The most important thing you should care about is what you're learning and whether you like your job and the people you work with. If your job has all of those, maybe it's fine to be underpaid while you're still at your first job and still learning.

I just don't think that means your salary is unimportant and something you can just disregard completely. Actually, I think your salary is important and you should consider it as an important factor, even if it is not the most important. I just think I would rather weigh all the above factors along with my salary, and that if I take an offer where I won't be compensated at market rate for the forseeable future, I do it fully knowing what I'm getting into.

It seems like common sense to me that the pay you start out with establishes the baseline for the pay for the rest of your career. Maybe our mentor simply isn't the type to think that kind of stuff is important in life, but I feel like it's part of my job to look out for myself and make sure I'm being paid as much as what companies would pay others. As a woman, I hear all the time that a common reason women are not paid as much as men is because we do not negotiate enough, and I hate the idea of simultaneously undermining myself and letting others take advantage of me.

So if you're not going to pay me at market rate, I'm going to ask you why. I'd rather you be transparent about it -- whether the company can't afford it, whether it's because I haven't grown as much as you would like, etc. -- instead of making promises to adjust my salary and seeming less than committed to it when the time comes. Because as much as I would love to live in a society where jobs only reflect your passions, we actually live in a capitalist society. One where a company's lingua de franca for communicating your worth is how much they compensate you. If you do not pay me at market rate and provide no contextual reasons as to why, I'm simply led to think that you do not value me as much as other companies would.

And besides how much I'm learning, the people I work with, the endless amounts of opportunities I'm given at work... part of my happiness at work is knowing that my work is valued, and that I myself am valued at the company. I want to know my work is valued and that I am being compensated appropriately for it.

Aannnyyway, all that above rant mostly had to do with my mentor. It's not like I actually know whether the company will low-ball me again when February comes and they do the company-wide raises. It's just that... I don't know. The words of my mentor didn't do much to strike confidence in me, and the vague promises of my boss haven't done enough to inspire confidence in me so far. It's not a number; it's not anything in writing. Do they actually want me to hold out for four more months past my year anniversary to know how much they will compensate me, only to potentially find out that by "my growth being taken into consideration" I still am paid less than my peers? It's demotivating, to say in the least.

Although I could try to gain some more clarity by having a 1:1 with my boss on this topic, I know I might have more leverage in the case they aren't actually serious about adjusting my salary to market rate if I have other offers in hand and I know my worth. So because I lack total confidence in my company, I'm being prudent by researching the market and looking into opportunities elsewhere before I broach the conversation. Mostly to be well-educated about what I can negotiate for, but if it so happens another company is more appealing than my current one (even if pay were equal), I can't really help that, can I? I'd tell my boss to blame it on my mentor for not exactly inspiring faith in me, and on the company for not being more proactive to make me confident that they do want to compensate me well.

P.S. I know it was a petty rant that got spiteful towards the end. :P Gotta give in and express yourself once in a while.