Essays for senior software engineers and engineering managers caught in the loop of "is it me?" — when capable people start treating their internal experience as evidence of personal failure.
From the inside, every gap reads as a personal failing. The default assumption when something feels hard is that you're the problem. Sometimes you are. Often you're not — and the loop of "is it me?" is itself the thing keeping you stuck. These essays are about the gap between how a problem looks from the inside and what it actually is, and what it costs when capable people treat their internal experience as evidence of personal deficiency.
From the inside, it's always your fault
The diagnosis of "I'm not doing enough" feels true from the inside — and it's almost always wrong. From the inside, every gap reads as a personal failing. The view from outside almost never agrees.
Read on The ADHD Engineer →It's not always a "you" problem
The default assumption when work isn't moving is that you're the bottleneck. Sometimes you are. Often you're not — and treating it as a "me" problem keeps you from seeing the actual one.
Read on The ADHD Engineer →You're not surrounded by fools — it's this
You can see more than the people around you. That's not a sign you're surrounded by fools. It's a sign of something else — and it explains more of the friction than the obvious explanations do.
Read on The Complete Engineer →The quiet question that surfaces once the career landed.
When more productivity systems, more accountability, and more discipline aren't moving you forward.
The parts of senior engineering and engineering management nobody writes job descriptions for.
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