Mariane Bekker

One of the ways to encourage them to maintain work life balance is to not send slack/emails after 6pm or during the weekend unless something is urgent. If they see you taking time off and enjoying your time off, they will feel more comfortable doing the same. On the other hand, if they see slack messages/emails happening after hours, they will have the expectation that work is expected during those hours.

Every city has networking events happening every week. Find a few that have a shared interest and attend them. Sites like lu.ma, meetup, partiful and eventbrite will show you different events happening in your area. You will meet new friends, and form meaningful connections. When you're networking always focus on how you can provide value to the other person instead of an immediate favor. This will ensure that people remember you and they will want to spend additional time with you.

Figure out ways that you can cut the scope of the project or build an MVP version of the feature within the timeframe. Even though the new feature will not be ideal, at least you'll present a solution that is feasible and that can be released to get early customer feedback.

If you want to switch to a full-stack developer, build on your own time a full-stack application from the ground up and deploy it to production. This will teach you how to fully set up an application from setting up the database, backend code, and front-end code to deploying it to the cloud. This will also give you a portfolio that you can showcase to your employer or future employers.

Continuous learning can be encouraged if you set in a place programs for your engineering team. One way I did it was that once a month, we would take half a day dedicated to learning. Engineers could spend half the day taking courses, pair programming, reading books about a topic that they were interested in. Having dedicated time, shows your engineering team that you really value learning!

When dealing with any type of conflict, always approach it with the win-win mentality. Find a solution where both you and your boss feel like they won, that means having to compromise on some aspects of the solution. Don't get emotionally attached to the solution, instead consider the conflict as a problem you can solve.