Ask HN: Do you have trouble recalling what you've contributed at your job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you have trouble recalling what you've contributed at your job?

21 pointsidontwantthis22 comments

I find that I really struggle to remember what I’ve done specifically before the current task I’m working on. Then I go through my tickets and I start remembering, but off the top of my head it’s pretty blank.

Makes me nervous about getting fired and having nothing to talk about in interviews. I should probably be writing things down as I do them.

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I have ADHD with some dissociative features which tends to make my narrative memory very poor out of the gate. Unfortunately its one of those things that either you have a really good continuous memory or you have to be really organized and orderly to make time every week to summarize.

This is one of the things that chatbots are really good at doing, but there can be security problems if sensitive data is passed into an external service when talking about your work day. If there's any interally focused tool that works for that, use it along with your notes, and you can quickly get summaries of the whole week.

Another reason might be that, something really common among neurodivergent developers, you may feel some amount of shame over time spent "working" or "being productive" vs not, so making a full accounting of time spent can feel like a ton of pressure to grapple with "not being good enough". Its one of the ways that imposter syndrome can rear its head.

If any of this might be what you're feeling, it may be time to grapple that your brain isn't neurotypical and you don't work in a neurotypical way. I've been massively praised about my output and gotten multiple promotions and even put on leadership tracks, but always had imposter syndrome because I'd look at my day and realize I spent a lot of time just pondering, pacing, doing self care or spending time with my focus divided - aka working but not to what I counted as it.

This hits home for me, on all counts.

What I've been doing is keeping track of all my projects and the actions that I've taken. Based on this, I can then weave a narrative.

I feel like I missed a lot of opportunities because I couldn't answer the "tell me about a technical problem you've solved" question. Once a problem is solved, the intermediate steps between problem and solution just evaporate out of my memory.

Thats precisely me as well. Its like a closed book in my head. This is killing me a bit right now in interviews, especially as I had to take a few years off to deal with some health problems.

One idea I had that I'm not sure will work is to try to build mind maps of projects I've done, in order to at minimum build some tabs in my head.

I keep a daily log where I scribble down some basics of what I did that day. At the end of the week, I go through that, consolidate it into a few things I did that week, and add it to a git repo.

When I need to do performance reviews or something, I read over those summaries. A few bullet points per week is manageable enough that I don't try to condense it further, but I do use them as inputs when I'm doing performance reviews or updating my resume.

I have people tell me I worked on something, and then show me the proof that I made it, and I have no recollection of ever doing it. And I’m not “forgetting”, because someone is trying to blame me for something. They will be thanking me for something and I have no idea what they’re talking about.

It’s a good idea to keep track of the big items from each year as they happen. It’s very easy to forget.

> Makes me nervous about getting fired and having nothing to talk about in interviews.

I always exaggerate about that. For instance, It’s not that I don’t know Kafka (I have used extensively in side projects), but I would say I did something with it in my current/previous job if the next job requires it even if all I did was mundane tasks that have nothing to do with Kafka. companies don’t care what tech you have used in side projects, they care what tech you have used in previous jobs). It’s a win-win because I get the job and they get someone who knows the tech they are looking for.

Do a `git log --author='<Your Name>'

Then unless IP issues restrict you from using ChatGPT, ask it to summarise your work and also split the summary into weekly, monthly, year logs. Read that summary and it can serve as a good reminder of what else ancillary work you did (design work, authoring docs, conducting trainings etc)

Of course, all of this is assuming you are an Individual contributor whose major work is design and implementation. Otherwise YMMV.

That’s an incredible idea, even without chat gpt. I’ve always been a good git commenter. Thank you!

Print out copies of your annual review. Take them home. Put them in a file. Pull them out when job hunting.

You just made me wish we actually did annual reviews haha.

I'm still waiting on my mid-year review. Managers were supposed to have them done by July 31st. The rest of my team had theirs done in early August (still late), but at least they got one.

I'd love not to have them

Always. I set myself a once-monthly task to summarize, but never seem to do it.

Part of the problem is that the current/recent tasks easily push out finished ones, and I think that's pretty normal for humans. (Heck, we're even wired to forget things when we pass through doorways. [0])

Then the things you do recall well--a harrowing tale of tracking and slaying an amazingly evil bug--are hard to translate into resume-form that will mostly be consumed by non-developers. You fixed X and then the effect on the bottom-line is... Uh... Hopefully happier customers? By some kind of amount?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect

Indeed!

You might want to consider starting a “brag document”: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

I send an email to my manager every week with two headings: “This week” and “Next week.” 3-5 concise bullet points under each heading, no sub-bullets. I avoid bullets like “Met with Sal about XYZ” or other wheel-spinning stuff that doesn’t translate to a performance review or interview. I include links liberally. Every manager has loved these emails, and they’re really handy for performance reviews, interviews, or even as a paper trail.

I post to a standup channel in Slack every day. I say something substantial most days and almost always give ticket numbers there. We also have a weekly Google Doc for IT work which I usually updated based on my Slack standups.

I have Python scripts which can read out Slack, Google Docs, and Jira. So given a few minutes I can always generate text that shows I worked on a huge number of tickets and did a lot of work.

I hate performance reviews as much as the next person, but one of the useful things my previous company made us do was the self-reflection.

The self-reflection portion forces me to remember what I was doing, and equally importantly it forces me to figure out how to explain what I was doing. The ability to craft a narrative around your experiences is a very powerful skill.

I keep an email folder called "Good Stuff" which contains all email positive email feedback I've received and then I refer back to that at appraisal time.

I created a public work log in a shared doc. I added to it every day and summarized by week. Anytime a boss or colleague or project manager asked what I’m doing or what progress I’d made I linked them my active work log.

Boom, daily weekly quarterly contributions in great detail with minimal overhead.

Yes. I am not good at recalling things in general.

At my past jobs (I am now self-employed), I would just have a journal of things I did and things I had to do. One page per day, with to-do items being manually copied to the next page every morning. This gave me a really clear idea of what I accomplished while on payroll.

I got caught out and downlevelled due to not having great brags.

I wonder if it better to write down the brag worth thing you will do before you do it.

You don't need a list of tasks. A SMART goal once a Q creates 4 anecdotes a year.

Yeah, it's normal. Nobody remembers what anyone works on. You just go incrementally, then before you realize it, you're past a million downloads. The sleep deprivation and anxiety make it worse.

What I do is have an entire week plan on Workflowy. Split that into daily lists. Populate it with tickets you plan to take. Then move them around until the day you actually finish them and mark them as complete on the day. It's a good record.

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