2020 Work Log

It’s been a long time since I last wrote a daily log. I’ve decided to break that streak.

As the days go by, my stress has been growing heavier and heavier, while interviews and work matters have been overwhelming me to the point of suffocation.

One day last week

Had lunch with Liu Ge today.

I believe most engineers (including myself) have some degree of imposter syndrome. Often times, we face situations where our own abilities are insufficient, yet we still need to overcome the obstacles in front of us. In such cases, relying on others’ work and “best practices” feels safer. However, we quickly assume these “best practices” are well-thought-out and certainly applicable to our problems. Cloud providers benefit when you enable more services. Microservice advocates also profit when you buy their books. Both have incentives to sell you technologies you may not need.

Had lunch with Lin Nan, had an interview in the afternoon.

Today’s work is to continue the TLM refactoring. To be honest, the workload of this task is much larger than I imagined.

I estimate that I can probably finish the parser today.

I plan to do a round of summarization after finishing Sectioning, and abstract some traits.

Had an interview from 1 to 2 PM today. The young guy was pretty good. I think we can add one more coding round.

Slacked off until 4 PM.

Jingzai helped review my resume. There’s a lot I can improve, but I can’t openly work on it during office hours, so I’ll have to leave a bit earlier and fix it after getting home. But then I won’t have enough time left for TLM. So I really shouldn’t have slacked off today. Sigh, especially since all I did was play on my phone—literally nothing productive! I can’t keep doing this.

One bug and follow-up work for TLM remain.

Discussed TLM refactoring with mentor; it’s still quite complicated, but at least there is a direction. We can proceed in that direction.

In the evening, walked 20,000 steps with Qiaobo in Zhongguancun.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a mental breakdown. Anxiety surged up, and I started feeling really awful. From around 4 or 5 PM until 7 PM, I decided I had to leave, but I basically accomplished nothing. During that time, I kept feeling that my work had lost its meaning, and I launched into a complaining mode. Just like I told Qiaobo on Sunday, both the company and the team have problems. The company’s problem is that the slogan of “walking on two legs” sounds loud but leaves no hope in sight, while the team’s problem is that my mentor’s management style is too authoritarian. I feel like I’m just a tool—every line of code I write has to follow his style, his design, with little autonomy. So I feel like the meaning of work is gone. On top of that, having already decided to leave, and the current task (TLM refactoring) feeling so abstract, I felt increasingly pressured.

But no matter what, I need to keep a good mindset, handle the tasks at hand, and set clear boundaries.

This morning, as usual, I slacked off (Why “as usual”??? This can’t go on!)

At 2 PM, I finally started doing serious work. Actually, it’s because I don’t quite agree with the recent tasks I have to do—namely, the so-called TLM refactoring. Over the past two years, I’ve increasingly realized that I need a top-tier environment; otherwise, there is no growth.

So for now, I’ll first complete the current tasks according to the specification, and then address my own problems from other angles.