In my last post about becoming a better programmer while still having a life, I talked about communication. Specifically, making sure you understand why you’re doing a task and what the eventual user of that feature wants to accomplish. That’s far from the only thing communication is good for, though. It’s not just about clarifying tasks, it’s also important to communicate status. Strictly speaking, this may not make you a better programmer in terms of getting things done. It does, however, make you easier to work with and that’s a big part of being a professional. And in the interests of full disclosure, I’m not always great at this, especially when I’m busy, but I try.
If you use slack, a good solution for my team and maybe yours is to post little updates about what you’re working on and how it’s going in your dev channel. When you share what you’re working on, people will have something useful to tell you surprisingly often. I’ve had coworkers tell me about existing code I hadn’t seen before that applies to my problem, ways they had already tried to do something and failed (super helpful because it narrows down what I have to try), or bring up potential issues I hadn’t thought of.
Team leads also really seem to like having a running list of what you’ve been doing and if you’ve hit any snags lately. In my office it’s common for people to work from home, which means my team lead can’t always rely on chatting with people in the lunchroom or on the way to get coffee to figure out whether our tasks are going well or not. My last set of updates were a series of complaints about how badly I was getting along with play 2.5’s requirejs plugin, don’t feel like you have to have positive or even particularly well thought out updates.
Nobody particularly likes to post a bunch of updates about how badly things are going, but that’s actually really useful for your team lead and the rest of your team to know. They can’t make plans about next week if they have no idea how much stuff is going to get done this week. Your team lead doesn’t just know what you’re doing or if you need help, you’ve got to tell them directly. If your updates are always about how badly things are going that’s a useful sign that something is wrong. It could be that you and/or your team lead need to find another solution because the current one isn’t working, it could be that your assignment isn’t at the right level for you and you need some help, it could just be that it’s an especially hard task and you’re not going to be available to do anything else for a while.
If something is going poorly, it’s always better to talk about that sooner rather than later. Seriously, waiting too long to raise the alarm kills projects. Now, it is true that in dysfunctional workplaces you may be blamed or punished for bringing up perfectly reasonable concerns. I’m not going to pretend that every boss you’ll ever have will be the perfect manager, but if you bring up a concern and get ignored or punished for “being negative” I want to reassure you that you are not the problem and didn’t do anything wrong.
If things are going well, you should talk about that too. Just like your team lead needs to know if they can’t give you another task, they need to know if they do need to get another feature specced out and ready for you to work on next.
Whether or not you ever show anyone else your list of things you got done (and it’s not a bad idea to have that handy for when annual review time comes around), just looking back at your list can help motivate you. When I feel like I haven’t been accomplishing anything, it can be really helpful to scroll back through the updates I’ve given and remember that while I maybe didn’t end up with a lot to show for my fight with requirejs, I did learn a lot about play 2.5 plugins and build processes and that will definitely be useful later.
If ongoing updates throughout the day are too much information you can do daily or weekly updates, the only essential part is giving updates on a regular basis. Definitely don’t feel like you need to write a novel for every update, status updates are meant to let people know what you’re up to, not to eat up time you could be using for your actual work.
Giving status updates regularly probably sounds like a really small thing, but it’s been incredibly useful for me.