Feeling I'm being held back - have been unproductive for weeks [closed]

Question

To begin with, here's a bit of background.

I work at a small company of about... I think I would be exaggerating if I said 25 people. I'm one of the regular software engineers in the company, based in the Netherlands, working 4 out of 5 days. There are two more software engineers who aren't here frequently (either work a single day, or tend to shift attendance from being here weeks on end then working elsewhere), and the other regular employees have entirely different jobs such as hardware developing, or internal business, or marketing.

The senior software engineer who is my direct supervisor is one of the other software engineers who is here frequently.

For the most part, he maintains our code bases - style, flow, etc. I have to do the usual if I want to add a change - make a PR on the repo, let him know, and so on and forth. Recently he changed our git flow so we have to merge feature branches into our local and forked develop branch, then make a pull request from the forked develop branch into the upstream develop branch.

I'm not quite happy with this change myself, as it throws me into a dilemma. He has voiced displeasure in the past with big pull requests, yet changing the flow into this model makes it impossible (or so I feel) to make seperate, smaller pull requests for bugfixes, new features, hotfixes and such.

There's also the fact I feel like I have nothing to do. We make use of a ticket system, and I have some tickets open that I know I've worked on, yet they're awaiting review, or merging, etc. The senior engineer is tasked with reviewing, while also having a project to work on entirely by his own, while also needing to work on this project. I'm not entirely sure what the other developers are doing. I know one of them works on the website that allows integration with the project I'm working on. But it feels like they have much more to do than I do.

I'm not quite certain if the senior developer is aware I have nothing to do, as when I ask him for a task, he simply points to my tickets, or just says 'check the tickets'. What tickets? It usually ends up in a catch 22, as the tickets I have open are awaiting approval, review, merging...

This situation is rather demotivating, and I'm not sure what to do. They require me to be more on time, but being stuck in a situation like this just makes me less strict with being on time, as I feel I'm wasting it when I could be doing other things instead of hounding other people. I'd rather be productive.

I'm not quite sure what to do anymore.

Also... I'm not saying this as an excuse, I'm saying this as I feel it could help provide a little bit of extra background for those who are aware of what it is. I'm diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, and as such have trouble communicating with people - I'm usually stuck in my own little world of bits and bytes.

EDIT:

For clarification, we don't have meetings. This is also my first ever job. It just feels like the senior programmer is a lot colder and more distant to me than he is to the other programmers, I have trouble pulling him aside to talk about what I'm doing and what I need to do.

And... why is this being downvoted?

EDIT2: In hindsight, I believe this 'question' would work better in IPS. My apologies.

Answer 1

I am concentrating on the whole stack of stuck tickets and no work to do, I can't comment on GIT.

Your first thing to do is ensure everyone of your tickets says why you are waiting.

If you have a status "waiting for review" use it, if you don't ask for one to be added.

If they are stuck waiting for information, add to the ticket what information you are waiting for, and if you have been waiting more than a day put them "on hold" or some similar status.

Then go to the senior developer with all your tickets up to date and ask to discuss them. Explain where every ticket is stuck, what you are waiting upon etc.

He might have ideas of stuff you can do to move them on, he might realise what a bottle neck he is etc.

In our current team we have a meeting every day where you explain all this, and the magic word to get help is BLOCKERS say what blockers you have.

But then the ball is well and truly in his court.

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p.s. the aspergers, Going into this meeting fully prepared is essential, don't leave anything to wing it as for me the moment I have to try and wing it I end up in a panic saying stupid stuff I don't really mean and can't back up.

So a really important phase is I don't know let me find out aparently good people say that all the time it isn't am embarrassing or stupid thing to have to say, source my husband who is a business consultant.