When your productivity is not enough for your boss

What happens when you are struggling with your tasks but your boss thinks that you should work/think faster?

Posted by Eneas Lari on Octomber 15, 2020

Let's talk about my working environment and its employer's productivity.

I work for the second year as a software engineer at a company that develops and maintains ERPs,CMSs and POSs(if you don't know what they are, you dont lose something important from your life, so I wont explain it).The company I work for a year now is the second company i work for, the first one was in a similar position but I was more some kind of in the customer support/development section ,so not so much programming for me. Anyway,the point of this post is to discuss about how guilty you should feel about your decreased performance and the way the boss wants you to feel.

Lets jump to beginning of the story. When I first came to the company I though finally I will be a full time programmer. I will learn serious development i will be a grown ass man developer, the next Anders Hejlsberg(creator of C#). My first interview was at the manager's office which was in the same room with developer's, it was a quite room everyone was commited to his work, super proffecional environment,i hit the jack pot. YEA!
No boy I was wrong , everyone was just afraid and trying to look super productive. As I first started to work there i immediately understood that, I have a good nose for smelling bullshit's when it comes to working place. After the first month I was already hating the job and the environment(not my coworkers) and the energy in the room, I was feeling more heavy than my previous work. Despite the difficulty of the environment I managed to learn the codebase of the system and be able to finish the given tasks,easy tasks like chage the button , add this property , add this field's name etc. and that was the problem.!

For many months I was just doing trivial tasks with no difficulty and I was OK with that. Some months before being a year in the company(now) they assigned me some very demanding tasks without telling me what and how to do it. OK I am a big buffed dude I can make this. Alone!. But eventually the tasks where more buffed and they were taking anabolics. So it took me more time than usually, and everytime I was asking for help from my coworker who has developed the whole thing it was very unpleased that I was not understanding his way of thinking.Shame on me for not having psychic abilities or not being smart enough.

After one week the manager wanted to talk to me. He told me that the statistics are showing that my productivity has fallen and that even if he thinks I am smart i don't respond good enough to the challenges/tasks and that he gives me three days to finish nine tasks that I had remaining and that he doesn't care how nut he wants the tasks to be finished until Thursday. I shocked not because of the deadline because i knew i could do it,but because of his attitude, he was a whole different person and that he sees me only as a statistic. I know ,i know he manages a team he has to be harsh sometimes but i hate being treated like that, I am a sensitive person i admit it 😂. OK seriously now, When i see those kinds of behaviors on me I dont feel bad or guilty at all being unproductive in my work,because i know I am not a lazy piece of shit, when I love what I am doing I work like terminator with a chopper. So the point is that many of as we suffer from imposter syndrome without realising that maybe we are not in the right environment,ok maybe its not so easy to go somewhere else but at least don't feel guilty about your skills.Be strong and confident like Terminator who enters a bar without clothes.

That was falks,

Thank you for reading Eneas Lari.