TL;DR: You got promoted or you wanted to get promoted. You decide you want to make a bigger project to show ambition, advance your career and whatnot. You embark on making some grand project, disappearing from view. This often leads to you getting stuck with something, falling behind and various negative effects like getting a PIP or becoming depressed.
His prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.
(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)
The real prescription to stopping this is to only commit to looking at the problem for a few days regardless of how much progress you’re making. And never take on open-ended tasks with no sunset date. A CTO had me take an open-ended dev project once and I learned that the lack of a time box made it really miserable.
I concluded long ago that anyone who writes without capitalizing the first letter of their sentences is not worth paying attention to, due to some combination of hubris, delusion, etc...
Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight
i voice to text. in hopes of getting the thing to stop capitalizing every third word because it's somebody's trademark, i told it to stop autocapitalizing. So here i am. blame Google
You probably need a better speech-to-text system then. I type 90% of my comments on HN with FUTO keyboard, which is a local speech to text engine, and it handles capitalization properly most of the time.
I kind of feel this way except I have a guy on my team that I actually really respect, that for some reason can't capitalize things. It's just one of those quirks I'm willing to work around because he's otherwise awesome.
What is he writing that doesn't get capitalized? Code comments or entire multi-hundred or thousand line issues, specs, etc? The context matters.
Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.
I call this (well, in my head) the Sam Altman Fellow Kids style.
It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.
I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.
Absolutely agree, I had my manager play it for me in my first company. And since I did not learn how to play it effectively or the importance of it, I think I suffered/suffering in my subsequent job(s).
I think the senior -> staff certainly could require a concentrated effort to mke that leap in a lot of situations so don't doubt I was luckier there. But again I never took on work with the thought "this will help me reach staff" it was always "this will help the company" or "this will help my team" which is the distinction I was trying to make
Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.
I don’t think this is universal advice. I’m also a staff engineer and had to ask to get promoted to senior and staff level. Yes, you have to actually be doing good work and operating at that level as you say, but promotion culture has enormous variance. Sometimes you have to advocate for yourself. A mentor of mine was a VP of Engineering at mid-size companies for ~20 years and told me that he never got a promotion he didn’t ask for.
At least we know this wasn't written by an LLM (unless it was GPT-2).
The best advice I can give on moving your career forward is to not try and get a promotion at your current job. Apply for better positions at other companies while you still have your current role. You'll have maximum leverage and unlimited time to choose the best possible option. Trying to claw your way up the ladder in a single company is the least efficient (and more often than not hopeless) strategy.
Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.
I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.
But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.
And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
“Your job isn’t your job. Your job is to find your next career step.” Paraphrasing from memory from Scott Adams’ “How to fail at almost everything and still win big.”
I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.
This used to be true during the zero interest rate days when you could leapfrog up the chain but I think the times have changed.
By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.
If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.
The 'job hopping advice' is always so one-dimensonal as if salary maxing is the only metric that counts. You should always take everything into account
- work climate and coworkers
- work life balance
- legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)
This. I hate interviewing. I hate having to "learn" new people and corporate processes. I like being able to rely on intuition I've built up over time, both about my colleagues and the products.
Bouncing from place to place could have earned me more money over time, but I valued the stability of sticking around for longer stints.
It is still good advice at early to mid stages of career. You can get into senior level much faster, and potentially learn much more, since you're less pigeonholed into current role, and you see more of how other organizations work.
The scenario laid out is pretty dated. Most scrum shops would not permit this level of backstory anymore. Admittedly I have seen this happen in the old days but it wasnt usually very impactful. It was in places where people had too much time on their hands and not much supervision.
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
> and what happens is they start disappearing for longer periods of time... they quit their jobs because they think, “you know what, this is not salvageable.”
I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.
Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.
If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them who you are so that they can select themselves out and when they are in.
Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.
I had the same impression. Surely we aren't the ones who are wrong! It couldn't be us!
I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
> I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years
You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s
Similar for me except that my tenures are usually 4-6 years, except this one job that I lasted 1 month because I fundamentally didn't want to do the work I was assigned to do (and would keep doing for at least a few months, probably longer).
The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.
It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.
You aren't necessarily wrong, but the data also isn't there - one engineering hire bouncing per year is not really significant.
I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.
I dunno, I found that kind of environment a lot easier to work with. The really hard environments are when the tech teams are large, to get something done you need to talk to 3 different teams and get them all to agree to do something and _when_ they are going to do it.
And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.
Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.
It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.
I guess "senior" just means older, but in the usual sense, the more senior you are, the more your job involves coordinating with other people. So I don't see how you could disappear when promoted. But I think in this case it's just "you do more work".
I leave because it stops being "fun". The way my father put it is "when you start a job, they hand you 2 buckets. One they fill with money. The other they fill with crap. When the bucket of crap weighs more than the bucket with money, you leave."
If you don't truly enjoy what you do, you'll get crushed by the pressure. Don't try to impress people. If you feel pressure, take a step back, reflect, and think about what's important to you. Then communicate this clearly to people around you, including yourself.
I am having a hard time believing that anyone who uses the word "bro" this much is capable of advising anyone with seniority, because I don't see how they themselves would have the necessary seniority to give such advise.
But I suppose the message, hard to read as it is, is something that some people need to hear. I've seen this first hand a few times, mostly in people who got promoted by working really hard and the more they got promoted the harder they felt like they must work to keep proving themselves. This often led into burnout.
I don't know; I don't really want to blame the people themselves or say that they're the ones responsible of their own condition. People, and I want to say technically minded people in particular, are each rather fallible when it comes to our own humanity and the psychology underneath. And so, I'd much rather see this same advise be targeted to managers and senior teammates: when you notice a colleague who seems to have gone in too deep, have a friendly chat. They might very well be blind to it, or trying to ignore it to push through just that one more time.
> I am having a hard time believing that anyone who uses the word "bro" this much is capable of advising anyone with seniority, because I don't see how they themselves would have the necessary seniority to give such advise
I hear you, but this is your regular check-in that the matrix came out 27 years ago and this year's interns weren't even born yet. Sorry.
The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.
Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn though experience and cannot be taught by someone else.
you know, that's not completely true. taking breaks or shifting from one idea to the next doesn't necessarily stop the ingenuity and ideas from flowing down the first path.
your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.
I completely agree with you. As I’ve moved up the chain in engineering I’ve realized I suck at multi tasking. Constant reprioritization of tasks to focus on the urgent while also moving lower-priority ones forward has helped me accomplish short-term needs and slow-burning tasks.
> The senior you get the more you realise that the only reward for hard work is more work. Then, you learn to say no more often and set boundaries and negotiate like if you want me to work on project A, then I won’t have capacity to work on project B.
This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.
Yup. I work 35-40 hours a week. I do not put work stuff on my personal devices, I do not open my work laptop at home. This isn't something I negotiated or made explicit, it's just what I do. No one has ever objected to my work or output and I keep getting raises every year.
it's self inflicted Peter principle speedrun. Not even a heuristic like "could they do the job eventually" but they try to become incompetent immediately.
If a senior isn’t doing what they feel is meaningful work - or not communicating what they’re focused on, isn’t that partially on their manager?
obviously, more senior ICs should be creating/defining/delivering their own work. But either way, alignment with director or TL seems like a good idea to reduce anxiety
I’m in this exact position and I don’t know the next steps forward. I’m on a sabbatical because I burnt out after a massive project but the expectation is that I come back and lead another massive project.
I’ve yet to decide if that’s what I actually want or if there is another solution out there. Is leaving the only real solution?
I went through this and ended up becoming (through a long and twisted path) a maintenance super for an apartment building near my house. Maybe an overreaction but every day is a blessing compared to the mental anguish I experienced making corporate software
Would you be willing to share your story? Feels like it would be something a lot of folks would take peace in reading. Only if comfortable though. Thanks! :)
I genuinely don't want to upset anyone, but as someone with 20+ years of engineering and management experience, I think it might help some people to hear what is most likely really going on here.
This is probably an example of the Peter principle:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
There's a huge amount of title inflation going on in the industry. We're now seeing the "Principal Engineer" title being given to people with 3 years of professional experience.
Unfortunately, this is simply not enough time to be very good at all, no matter how much raw talent you have. It takes a decade of experience just to know how to manage yourself effectively, let alone mentor others and lead large projects.
I have a lot of trouble reading prose that’s written without capital letters. I can’t understand why writers would do that. Nor can I understand why readers engage with this.
Strongly agreed. Maybe it's the way it interacts with my ADHD but it makes it really difficult to read through and make sure I didn't skip anything. I need clearly visible sentence boundaries for that and capital letters truly help.
Writers, please think about us neurodivergent people and make the tiny effort of using your shift key please, it's not that difficult.
AI coding tools can really make the "in the next week, I’ll do a whole month’s work. and no one will know" feel especially tempting, particularly if you're deep in the execution phase of a project. Truth is that can end up like Brooks's law on steroids.
Instead, just communicate with your stakeholders asap. Chances are they already know the project is at risk, and they'll be amendable to either descoping or pushing back the deadline.
This is fine advice up to a certain point, but you do not accomplish bigger and grander things by working harder, nor even, as this implies, by working more diligently. You accomplish them through leverage.
It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.
He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of tickets closed, commits landed, and lines of code written can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.
Disappearing for long periods of time and the giving vague updates like "everything going well guys" is not the behavior of a (even mediocre) senior. This is the behaviour of a poorly managed junior.
As a senior its your responsibility not to disappear into a cave but to do the opposite - show what you are doing, show your thought processes so juniors can learn. Discuss openly your problems and encourage discussion and feedback and show the juniors that its ok to be vulnerable and not know everything.
Then you have to keep management informed exactly whats going on, where your Blockers are, what intermediate goals you have and progress towards them.
> the thing they do is they tell themselves they need to almost cosplay being a more senior engineer than they are.
Isn't this explicitly written in every promotion guide? Every one I've ever read says you need to be working at X level for Y months before getting promoted to X. Thats not delusion, that's codified. There's good reason people work like that.
> like, for two, three weeks, you won’t hear anything from them.
Two might be fine, three is probably pushing it, but a lot of times this is just bad communication (which I think is more the point). But also our field is extremely rushed for some reason, especially with AI. Sometimes things do take time. Honestly, I think the whole industry could move a heck of a lot faster if we just cooled our jets for a bit. Innovation doesn't happen by slamming your head against the wall, it happens in the quiet moments after lots of head banging. But our culture acts like we can brute force our way.
We constantly say "I'll fix it later" and we never do or do it when the problem has turned from a small one into a big one. Why can't we fix problem while they're still small? It's penny wise and pound foolish. Does your manager actually know if it will become a big problem? More than you, the person in the weeds? How would they even know? Would you even tell them? Are you afraid to tell them?
We're constantly jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, not taking any time to even check where we are or look up to see where we're going. And we attack anyone who pokes their heads up like we're afraid we'll get hosed reaching for a banana.
Is it really any wonder people burn out? You can't operate at high anxiety forever.
i’m very happy in the “terminal” senior position at my company, there are higher levels but it’s fine to stay at the level that i’m at forever. i don’t need to pick up extra work because im not trying to get promoted and i can usually get by just by having smart sounding ideas in meetings, helping figuring out the more ambiguous tasks and just doing enough to meet expectations. the expectations of the higher levels seem
pretty unpleasant , and the guys at lower levels than me are happy to pick up extra work because they want to get promoted lol
I just left somewhere where Senior used to be terminal, but they changed level expectations and senior's expectations became what staff were pre-LLM and then staff became what senior staff or even principal was, and senior lost its terminal status and everyone was given a time box to get promoted to staff or gtfo.
Man this really hit close to home as a guy transitioning from engineering to GRC. The last 1.5 years I have absolutely burnt myself out going flat out trying to make the transition to the next level and it has gone so poorly.
Sadly in many organizations it really does come down to a “consensus” within the environment about if you are succeeding in the role and fit. Woof.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 6.6 ms ] threadHis prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.
(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)
Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight
it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
https://keyboard.futo.tech/
Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.
It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.
I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.
Nice little soundbite but for this to work your personal interpretation of "good work" and "be nice" needs to align with the people around you and the broader organisation.
The best advice I can give on moving your career forward is to not try and get a promotion at your current job. Apply for better positions at other companies while you still have your current role. You'll have maximum leverage and unlimited time to choose the best possible option. Trying to claw your way up the ladder in a single company is the least efficient (and more often than not hopeless) strategy.
Interviewing sucks. I know, if you currently have a job then you don't lose anything. Other than precious time and I already feel like I don't have enough free time, I don't want to invest the remaining interviewing.
I have been in a few companies and yes, sometimes getting a promotion is literally impossible. I remember one company that didn't give me a promotion until I threatened to leave.
But if you find the right company, then you shouldn't even need to ask for a promotion.
And lastly, I would hope you are working for a company that you care about. That makes it more complicated to find a replacement
I haven’t followed that advice, because I quite like my jobs, and getting deep into a problem space is one of life’s pleasures. But, I do think it’s sound advice all the same.
By all means keep your eyes open outside of your org, but it's increasingly hard to even get a resume seen by a human on the other side of the hiring process.
If you have a good reputation on your current team, that places you above external candidates as you look to move up in your organization. Don't ignore that.
- work climate and coworkers - work life balance - legal rewards for staying (This might not apply to the US but in most of Europe you get progressively harder to fire the longer you stay at one company)
Bouncing from place to place could have earned me more money over time, but I valued the stability of sticking around for longer stints.
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
If someone needs close supervision to ensure they don’t get stuck like this and spiral, they probably aren’t ready to be a senior engineer.
I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.
Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.
Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.
I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s
The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.
It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.
I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.
And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.
Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.
It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.
But I suppose the message, hard to read as it is, is something that some people need to hear. I've seen this first hand a few times, mostly in people who got promoted by working really hard and the more they got promoted the harder they felt like they must work to keep proving themselves. This often led into burnout.
I don't know; I don't really want to blame the people themselves or say that they're the ones responsible of their own condition. People, and I want to say technically minded people in particular, are each rather fallible when it comes to our own humanity and the psychology underneath. And so, I'd much rather see this same advise be targeted to managers and senior teammates: when you notice a colleague who seems to have gone in too deep, have a friendly chat. They might very well be blind to it, or trying to ignore it to push through just that one more time.
I hear you, but this is your regular check-in that the matrix came out 27 years ago and this year's interns weren't even born yet. Sorry.
Mostly surfers and skateboarders, but some of those peeps end up as senior engineers.
Unfortunately, this is something you have to learn though experience and cannot be taught by someone else.
This assumes that you care about (at least a little bit) what the other side expects from you.
your hands might be limited that way, but your mind isn't.
This is something that you already realise very, very early in your career. The only hard thing is how to set boundaries and negotiate without infuriating the other side and burning bridges forever.
obviously, more senior ICs should be creating/defining/delivering their own work. But either way, alignment with director or TL seems like a good idea to reduce anxiety
I wish that I could travel back in time and tell my 25-year-old self this information.
I’ve yet to decide if that’s what I actually want or if there is another solution out there. Is leaving the only real solution?
This is probably an example of the Peter principle:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
There's a huge amount of title inflation going on in the industry. We're now seeing the "Principal Engineer" title being given to people with 3 years of professional experience.
Unfortunately, this is simply not enough time to be very good at all, no matter how much raw talent you have. It takes a decade of experience just to know how to manage yourself effectively, let alone mentor others and lead large projects.
Writers, please think about us neurodivergent people and make the tiny effort of using your shift key please, it's not that difficult.
Instead, just communicate with your stakeholders asap. Chances are they already know the project is at risk, and they'll be amendable to either descoping or pushing back the deadline.
It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.
He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of tickets closed, commits landed, and lines of code written can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.
As a senior its your responsibility not to disappear into a cave but to do the opposite - show what you are doing, show your thought processes so juniors can learn. Discuss openly your problems and encourage discussion and feedback and show the juniors that its ok to be vulnerable and not know everything.
Then you have to keep management informed exactly whats going on, where your Blockers are, what intermediate goals you have and progress towards them.
We constantly say "I'll fix it later" and we never do or do it when the problem has turned from a small one into a big one. Why can't we fix problem while they're still small? It's penny wise and pound foolish. Does your manager actually know if it will become a big problem? More than you, the person in the weeds? How would they even know? Would you even tell them? Are you afraid to tell them?
We're constantly jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon, not taking any time to even check where we are or look up to see where we're going. And we attack anyone who pokes their heads up like we're afraid we'll get hosed reaching for a banana.
Is it really any wonder people burn out? You can't operate at high anxiety forever.
A Claudism if I ever read one
Sadly in many organizations it really does come down to a “consensus” within the environment about if you are succeeding in the role and fit. Woof.