Ask HN: How do I keep up with work?

You need to be thinking internally about why things aren't getting done faster. What are your bottlenecks? What is slowing you down? In your mind you should be done with an assignment in roughly 2 hours and frustrated when the assignment takes longer. If an assignment does take longer than 2 hours write down why. You can keep this to yourself if you have to, but it is better to expose this as a series of comments on your work item.

If you are slow because internal processes are slow and you have to wait 10 seconds between each mouse click you have a serious problem that is beyond your control. You need to be screaming about this with anger, because apparently your job is at stake. If you are in framework hell that requires 10 steps of unnecessary stupidity to accomplish what can be done in a line of code otherwise you have a serious problem to be angry about. If you are slow because solutions to the programming logic do not instantly come to you then you have a cognitive problem that may or may not be solved with extended practice outside the office. Whatever the issue is you need to write it down for your own personal metrics so you can keep ahead of the office metrics.

At my last job everything was slow and everything was full of regression. I was slow because the product was incompetent with logic stuck between SQL insanity and framework hell. Furthermore, I was constantly fixing regression from other developers. I lost that job and didn't really feel bad about it. At my current job I am absolutely crushing it. Even with a low work ethic my productivity is extremely high and they promoted me before everybody else. It is not about how hard you work but what you accomplish.

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Second, let's talk about the job market.

If you want to be employable then have what employers care about. You really need to ignore what is popular for developers. Things that helped me find employment (I don't have all of these, btw):

* security clearance: secret, top secret, common public clearance from the FBI, and so on

* security certifications: security+, CASP, CISSP, and so on

* business certifications: PMP, Lean 6 Sigma, business titles, and so on

* education: bachelors, masters

* diverse years of programming experience: product design, architecture, test automation, A/B testing, and so on

* writing skills: blogs, published articles, published technical documents, and so on

The ones that landed my current job were the diverse years of programming experience, security clearance, and security certifications. What earned me the latest promotion was leadership, writing ability, and productivity. For me the goal before the promotion was to do as little work as possible and be otherwise invisible, which meant getting work done quickly in the best possible quality so that I didn't have to revisit it.

1) Use a linter and stop discussing spacing and formatting.

2) Start sizing tickets... or stop an unreasonable expectation of the same delivery for different scopes.

These are standard discussions that most teams sort out early on in a project. So maybe another way to look at this is that you have one underlying problem - you never communicated as a team to agree upon expectations. A 4 person team is way too small to be having these kinds of conflicts, so I'd work on improving communications and helping everyone get to a healthier place.

Yes, that is a given. I've never worked in a corporate environment where they didn't have a chosen IDE (from the small 4 employee company to the large multi-national defense conglomerate). Usually the company has an enterprise license, or at least will buy another seat/transfer a license when they hire a new dev.