Ad-hoc Tasks

Can you add this column on the view model?

Lets have a demo on this feature at 2pm.

Can you debug this calculation issue?

Part of my daily experience as a software engineer is to handle incoming ad-hoc tasks throughout the day. Normally, I would have a set list of tasks I would like to work on for the day. I’d start my day with the daily standup at 9.30am, letting my team know the tasks I’d plan on working on.

However, what actually happens will be different because there will be bugs or certain more urgent requests coming in that my team has to handle. I’m not sure if this applies to most software engineering teams, but it does happen to mine rather frequently at times.

I think part of it results from stakeholders perception that everything is easy to add on. Adding a button that does this, or calculating something differently may seem easy to non programmers but it actually does take time to coordinate with the frontend and backend, test things out and deploy. Not to mention that when I get distracted from a task, it takes me about 10 mins or so to get back in the groove to what I was working on before suddenly being interrupted again. Over time I got used to it, juggling between multiple tasks throughout the day and a good day is when I’m not interrupted and i can just focus on the tasks that I laid out for the day.

Does anyone else share a similar experience?