Third time in two months we had an incident. Five minutes of downtime. Two engineers at 8 PM trying to magic it back to life. The fix wasn't clear. Reverting to the previous deployment was faster. If we were lucky, everyone would keep living their evening and we could figure out what actually happened next morning.
You hire five 10x engineers. Simple math says you should get 50x output. Six months later you're getting maybe 12x. Where did the other 20x go? There's an invisible tax.
Your manager asks what you accomplished in the last quarter. You start listing things. Helped ship three features. Stayed late and unblocked two projects and fixed countless bugs She nods. Then asks, 'But what did you solve?'. You stop and think. You realize you don't have an answer.
Rachel left after less than a year. It wasn't her fault. She joined a growing company as a senior leader with a track record of building teams and delivering results. The company had momentum. The team was shipping. Leadership seemed aligned.
Jack is one of the brightest engineers on the team. He delivers when others can't. He goes the extra mile. Other engineers look up to him and executives seem to love him. There's just one problem... You don't like Jack.
I've done this dance enough times now to spot the pattern. Forms asking for exact dates from years back, hunting for documents you swore you saved somewhere, that familiar anxiety when your work history looks messier on paper than it felt living through it.
I can picture myself in a team meeting or a 1:1, bringing this up - and yes, I’m spoiling the article a bit - "Asking someone to review your work isn’t a favor. It’s part of the job. It’s literally in their job description".
Windows machines. The gift and the curse of this world. And for the record, I've been using Macs for the past ten years, so what follows might just be a Windows problem or... who knows.
Based on the git log, it’s been about six or seven months since I moved this blog over to Eleventy. I did take notes at the time and even started drafting a post about it, but then life happened. Things shifted, priorities changed, and that early draft is probably lost for good now.
As we step into February, we're faced with a blank canvas for the next thirty days. However, let's reflect on January first.