self compassion and the disposable engineer
I struggle with self-compassion and perfectionism, especially at work. I’ve been with my company for over 10 years, and I’ve accomplished a lot. I’m currently a principal engineer with a really positive reputation. One would think that I would feel content in my success, and enjoy the security of my position, but as my status within the company has risen, so have my expectations of myself.
As my paycheck has grown, so has my anxiety about justifying it. Beyond that, I feel like I have a lot of visibility and influence within my organization. This carries an increased sense of responsibility - to my team, and to teachers and students who use the products I work on.
I can be really hard on myself when I see something within the organization that doesn’t meet my standards, but I don’t have the ability to fix it. I feel like I would be able to have more control if I worked more, if I had prioritized my time better, if I was smarter, if I was savvier at organizational politics, if I was more likeable, if I had said the right thing at the right time the right way, etc…
This critical self-talk can become pretty harsh. I feel ashamed for procrastinating or getting distracted, or making mistakes, or overlooking something. I worry that I’m too lazy, and feel guilty about signing off of work at the end of the day, or taking a vacation day, or choosing to prioritize other things - time with family and friends, fun activities, exercise, sleep - over work.
Logically, I know that this is irrational. I have been extremely successful in my career - I am lucky enough to have helped to build wonderful and beloved products. I’ve solved really challenging technical problems. I’m a leader and a mentor.
And yet, the feelings persist.
In my efforts to work on this issue, I’ve come across the work of psychologist Dr. Kristin Neff, who
researches self-compassion and writes
books about it. She’s developed a scale to measure self-compassion, validated it, and correlated it with a variety of positive outcomes. She also has developed several interventions meant to improve one’s self-compassion.
Neff models self-compassion along three dimensions:
Self-Kindness vs. Self-Judgment - Do we talk to ourselves as a caring friend, or a mean critic?
Common Humanity vs. Isolation - When we make mistakes and suffer, do we see this as a shared part of the human experience, or do we feel like we are uniquely bad and therefore deserving of suffering in isolation?
Mindfulness vs. Over-Identification - When we suffer or feel shame for our mistakes and imperfections, do we become absorbed in these negative emotions, or are we able to approach them from a place of mindfulness - to allow them to happen with awareness and clarity?
One of the interventions that Neff recommends is to practice mindfulness so you can notice when you’re feeling self-critical, and to come up with a mantra so that you can remind yourself of these three dimensions. I ended up gravitating to something like this:
This sucks. Notice the suffering. Pay attention to the things that you are feeling and how you are talking to yourself in this moment. Be present - don’t try to push it away.
This is human. Remember that people are often imperfect
heuristic maximizers - barely aware of all the things that are happening in our own brains. We are messy. We do not have perfect control over our attention, emotions or impulses.
I can be kind to myself in this moment. Can you talk to yourself with compassion? If a friend was experiencing this situation, how would you talk to them?
Something that I’ve been noticing is just how sticky these self-beliefs have been. Why do I still feel this way, despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the harmful effects of these beliefs, despite the deliberate effort at self-compassion?
I think for me, a lot of it anchors on feeling disposable.
I moved to the US when I was 12, and lived in very precarious circumstances until I moved out at 17. My family was poor and dependent on an emotionally unstable person. We worried a lot about losing our source of financial support, and losing residence status.
We spent a lot of time navigating systems (immigration, employment, social work, education). If you’re poor, these systems tend to strip away your humanity. They’re chronically under-resourced and rife with rigid deadlines and rules. Call centers and waiting lists where it’s impossible to reach a human being. Labyrinthine procedures and forms. Rejections over tiny imperfections and technicalities. Run-arounds. Delays. Delays. Delays. All while your entire way of life hangs in the balance.
Many US residents will be familiar with the dehumanizing bureaucracy that is the US medical and insurance system. Many also experience it in their relationship with their employer and their landlord. When you don’t have familial wealth to fall back on, navigating these systems can feel like doing a high wire act over concrete. For an average person it’s basically impossible to become so financially secure that you can’t be wiped out by an economic downturn, mental illness, an injury or disability, or a chronic medical condition.
And so we live with the harsh reality that unless we are able to perform, we are disposable. Anxiety over being discarded drives a lot of the self-identification with hustle culture and the moral work ethic within this country. If I take on the values of the system, then perhaps the system will spare me. By taking on the values, it feels like we can exercise some control over the situation.
Unfortunately, by accepting the logic of this system and the morality of the work ethic, we are also simultaneously accepting our own disposability and lack of inherent worth, and laying the foundations for negative self-belief. The flip side of “if I work hard, I will be rewarded” is “if I get discarded, I deserve it for not being good enough”.
Tech is changing.
ZIRP is over. Hiring has slowed, and devs are hanging on to their jobs for a lot
longer. We’ve seen layoffs and a new emphasis on profit and efficiency. AI CEOs are claiming that programmers will soon be obsolete, and tech CEOs echo that messaging. Google is requiring that employees badge themselves in to make sure they’re complying with return to office. We’re seeing discussions about 996,
60 hour work weeks, etc…
Beyond that, tech is a maturing field. Computer Science programs at universities and coding boot camps blew up over a decade ago, and those people have since graduated and entered the work force. At the same time, a lot of the markets for tech have been saturated. Can you imagine starting a book-selling business from your garage these days? Or a restaurant review business? For all the mythologizing of the first wave of tech founders we forget that making money on the early internet was pretty easy. It was a gold rush. Throwing a few web forms in front of a database doesn’t cut it any more.
Over the course of my career I learned that perceptions and stories can matter a lot more than the truth. It doesn’t matter whether AI can or cannot replace a software engineer. What matters is whether the people with the money believe that it does. It doesn’t matter if tech CEOs are misled about what good work and work culture looks like. The perceived scarcity and prestige of the software engineer is what matters, and this prestige is slipping.
As this perception shifts, companies are becoming less interested in what tech workers want - autonomy, work-life balance, a sense of purpose. The veil of “making the world a better place” and diversity and inclusion, thin as it was, has completely fallen away (kudos to HBO’s Silicon Valley for calling this one early).
Tech bosses don't actually
like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear.
- Cory Doctrow, The enshittification of tech jobs (
link)
Tech (
and especially AI) increasingly feels like it’s only for 20-somethings with no responsibilities who are willing to throw themselves on the pyre of capital. If you’re not, it doesn’t really matter what you think or what you have to offer, the CEO will find someone else who will do it their way.
Amid all of this, I’m certainly feeling myself become more disposable. And as that anxiety sets in, I’m finding it turn inward. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”.
Bill Gates didn’t take a single vacation day, but you can’t work so hard that the quality of your work suffers. And you can’t push yourself to work. Well you have to, sometimes, but only at the right times. You should be intrinsically motivated to do your work, but there’s little information on how to actually develop that motivation. You should find the right problem, or maybe it’s actually about searching for the problem? What does it actually mean to work
hard?
To me, the piece reads as extremely naive. There’s no engagement with psychology or neuroscience, no mention of executive function, the science of attention or motivation or habit formation (for example, contrast this with the stronger by science goal setting and behavior change
guide).
There’s also a conspicuous absence of everything except the hard-working person. Does this person have a family? Kids? Friends? People who depend on them? Do they have passions outside of work? How do they inhabit their body - what do they eat? Do they exercise? How do they pay for things?
How does hard work fit inside a living, breathing, human life? Isn’t that the ultimate crux of the question of work?
While a lot is missing in this piece, one thing takes center stage: the morality of hard work. We are meant to admire the hard-working man, to aspire to be him. And, there is a lot of disdain for those who do not work hard. They are lazy, they are lying to themselves, they are misled, they give up, they are undisciplined, they are weak. There’s certainly plenty of ammo in here for your inner critic.
Unfortunately I don’t have any easy answers here - I am a work in progress. However, I can share some thoughts that have brought me comfort.
Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?
He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.
- From Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching
The first is the difference between internal and external boundaries. While I often can’t control my external circumstances, I can choose how I think about myself and how I experience the world. Even if the system treats me as disposable, I do not have to believe that I am deserving of such treatment. In those moments, I can be rooted in my inherent worth, and know that the system is wrong. If I am put into a situation where I am forced to act out economic violence on others (making choices over resources in an environment of scarcity - say, evaluating someone’s work performance which might lead to them being fired), I can do so without comforting myself in the moral framework of hard work.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
- Audre Lorde
I’ve been thinking about these quotes a lot, and reading Audre Lorde’s essays, and finding them very helpful.
I have been developing my confidence in my own world view and my experiences. There’s no shortage of people out there who try to tell us what to think and how we should feel. Certainly tech CEOs aren’t shy about offering us their particular brand of thought leadership.
But I have been here too, doing the thing; and I think they are wrong about who can do great work, and how to do it, and what the point of it all is.
I think there’s something really powerful about creating your own framework for seeing the world. To imagine the world as it could be, and to hold that vision with desire - to want that world to be true.
Within the context of technology, I want to be in an industry that values being of service to people. Not as a proxy for profit and productivity, not as a fig leaf to appease “woke” tech workers, but as a genuine, core part of what we’re trying to accomplish.
At Desmos, I was lucky enough to be a part of realizing this vision (
link link link) so I know it’s possible. Math teachers and students would stop me in the street to thank me for working on this product when they would spot my Desmos hoodie - because they felt seen and respected and taken care of by our products. I really wish that more tech workers could experience how incredible it feels to work somewhere where being of service to people is the main goal.
I want to be in an industry where we treat people as whole humans - with bodies, families, relationships, and needs. Where we fit work into our lives, and we don’t fit our lives around our work. I think creative, wonderful things can happen when we work on them because we choose to, not because we have to.
More broadly, I can imagine a world where people value kindness. Where we believe that every person has inherent worth, and is deserving of dignity - regardless of whether they produce a return on investment. The more I learn about our psychology, our brains, our bodies and our culture, the more obvious it becomes that we are all messy, flawed, irrational beings. With all that we now know about being human, it’s really hard to hang on to any sense of moral disdain - towards others, and towards myself.
It feels like things in the tech industry, and the US in general, are at an inflection point. As the tech industry matures, we will have our struggles over the conditions of our labor just like any other industry. It will be scary, and it will be unpleasant. We will not be spared of it for being special.
I hope this essay is of service to you in this time of transition.
And remember: This sucks. This is human. We can be kind to ourselves in this moment.