Pre-2023 Facebook

In the hazy before-times of 2014 tech, I joined Facebook. I was the first person hired specifically as an engineer in an Austin office that employed fewer than 200 people in all roles. One of them was my brother. It was not a company back then so much as a cult. My first 6 years there were the hardest I’ve ever worked, the most I’ve ever learned, and, to quote a project manager of mine at the time, a ticket into “a theme park for psychos,” who would gleefully stay after work to keep talking about work.. we just also added drinking and played video games when 6-7pm or so rolled around.

For ~6 months I was a completely useless little ball of stress held together by imposter syndrome, intense curiousity, and a stubbern refusal to admit defeat by a serious of 1s and 0s. Then, all in one moment, I woke as an “SME” - someone who other people went to for advice and help and was considered senior, and In Charge Of Things. This was not because I all of a sudden had become an expert; it was just a common on a team where we had only 1 engineer for every 300 million users, and if you’d been around for 6 months, that was longer than 50% of everyone else. But it didn’t help with the imposter syndrome.

For about 8 years after than, my job was roughly divided like this:

15% tackling really, excellently fun, important, and hard problems that I loved, even as they burned out my brain.ZZZ
30-40% answering the questions of whoever came by my desk
95% providing therapy for the totally valid and stress-induced nervous breakdowns of my coworkers in small 1:1 conference rooms
100% tech-driven pranks and meme wars with my team, who, predictably, after eating all of our meals together, working all day, and spending time together after work, came up with some pretty intricate ones.

Finding Focus with What 3 Things

After a few years of finding myself accidentally working as a mostly full-time therapist in addition to my day job, I kicked off a weekly post called “What 3 Things Alyshia’s Doing This Week.” I had two main strategic goals for it:

Keeping Myself Focused: Writing these posts helped me prioritize and avoid saying “yes” to too many things at once.
Scaling Therapy: I hoped it would encourage my newer engineers (who I always called younglings, regardless of age) to take a deep breath and realize it’s okay to not finish everything all at once.

Those posts became a ritual over time that helped me to incorporate balance, calmness, and perspective in an evironment where the potential for error was huge, and everything always seemed to be on fire.

When Everything Must Be Done at Once

Sometimes, though, the idea of “not doing everything at once” just doesn’t hold up. Right now, I’m in one of those moments where I do need to tackle everything at once. So, I’m restarting my “What 3 Things Alyshia’s Doing This Week” posts with a clear purpose:

Track Eeverything: By documenting my priorities, I can monitor the size of my workload over time.
Ease the Crunch: My goal is to watch that workload shrink as I chip away at it before the September 12th deadline.

I can’t get this down to 3 lines yet, but the goal is to get there by October. Here’s to managing the madness, finding balance, and coming out stronger on the other side!

#TODO Silly List 📝

TODO List, for real though