“Albert, I feel like you’re in the weeds too often”

I still remember when my boss said that to me about a decade ago. We were sitting in a patio outside the office, it was one of those typical bay area bright sunny days, and he wasn’t exactly facing me, sort of looking off into the distance.

This was before when I realized requesting feedback, and making giving feedback as easy as possible, was key to your career. And I richly deserved this particular feedback. I’d spent the past month heads down, debugging our many machine learning data pipelines, trying to figure out why moving our terabytes of training data was so slow. It’s doubly infuriating when you know the sheer cost of these machines plus the storage costs PLUS the uncertainty if finally this time we’ll produce a Production grade model.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Multiple, multiple nights spent watching flows, rewriting queries, trying to look at object size, choosing different data formats, different processing frameworks. But a key miss was that I wasn’t providing my manager with proper estimates, timelines, and options, however ballpark they were. I wasn’t giving him the data needed to make decisions how much resources to invest.

Whenever I look back, I feel a pang of guilt for not doing my job as a senior engineer, and treasure that moment because it was sort of the turning point in my career. Estimating, progress reporting, giving your manager right sized details so they can decide on the next steps, etc. I’ve been trying to make that a cornerstone of what I do.

But these days I realize something yet again new. Summarizing is good, but at the same time you HAVE to know the details as well. Else what exactly are you summarizing?

Everything in life is a circle isn’t it.

One day I have to track that manager and buy him a coffee. Or two.