I love living in Ireland, in part for the distance that it gives me - a reminder that life is life, and work is work. But I also miss the sense of community you get from being in more of a "hub", so I took the opportunity of recent travel to catch up with more tech people, IRL.

As an engineer, I'm thinking so much about the upheaval in engineering - but I had completely missed what was happening in design. A designer caught me up, and it did totally make sense when I thought about it - my love of Claude Design is hardly unique, and others are seeing it as a viable alternative to an expensive human. That field is also changing, in similar ways to engineering - when the mechanical work is offloaded to machines, and humans are trying to find their place in it.

Big tech people are calling the upheaval "hunger games". Hunger games is not my vibe - neither the book (or movie?) nor some sick approximation of it in the workplace, so I'm not entirely sure what it means, but it's evocative of an unhealthy level of competition, where people fight each other instead of the system. People at mid-sized companies are talking about the performative dances that go on - where people privately share fears, but publicly pretend everything is A-OK, hyping up their impact.

All of this is a reaction to change that is driving standards up, in an industry that used to be very comfortable. I went to one event, Pride Flags and free food in a gleaming microkitchen, it reminded me of tech pre-pandemic. And then instead of the panel of senior professionals my friend and I had come for, we got a negotiation 101 on brag lists and asking for what you're worth. I left as soon as I could. My friend and I had sushi and Real Talk instead - much more nourishing.

The thing about standards increasing, especially in unhealthy ways, is that the bullshit increases too. On some level, it's understandable - people are playing the game they think is on to stay employed.

On a meta level, it feels so wasteful. So much human potential, spent on infighting and bullshit. The relief of being in such small start ups, where there's nothing to fight over. The only thing in abundance is work.

I have noticed over the past few months, since I stepped away from a lot of needless drama, that I have this full body nope reaction to any hint of drama. I am so trained to question myself, but dumping all the communications into Claude and asking it to outline what happened, check whether I'm being unreasonable helps a lot. Turns out I'm quick to assume the worst, but the boundaries I want to set are very normal. Perhaps now I can set those boundaries, it will level out.

If you're living through the shift, I empathise - some things that helped me, clearer now with distance.

Build the narrative. Think about what you'd talk about in an interview. You carry all this weight around - the drama, the politics, the who-said-what. But when someone asks you what you did, you don't say "I dealt with a lot of bullshit." You talk about what you built. What can feel like the whole job is something you deliberately skip over when you look for your next one. I think that tells you something about what matters and what does not. You have to navigate some politics to get anything done. But the rest of it? Best not given energy to.

Allocate your energy. Deciding what you're not giving energy is only half of it - you need the thing you are giving energy to. For me, I opted out of so much to write a book. But you know what? I wrote a fucking book. No one can take it from me. And that is a much bigger thing to take with me than winning some fight about something I didn't really care about, anyway. You get one life. It's yours, not capitalism's, and certainly not some conglomerate's. Don't give it all your fire - save something for yourself, whether friends, partners, or hobbies - something that lasts.

Ground yourself in your values. You take your values with you. You live them, to varying degrees, everywhere. Breaking them for something at work - a promo, a bit of standing - is short-term gain for long-term cost. That long-term cost can be burnout: values mismatch is one of the six drivers of burnout in Maslach's model. Sometimes you go along with things, and that's the job. But sometimes you can choose, and when you can, it's worth choosing with purpose.

Finally, you may have to play the game. You don't have to believe it. It's all fake. The stuff built on top of it is just a weird motivational strategy. Maybe it works for some people, but if you enjoy the work, the impact... focus on that bit. That can be real.

What I've been doing

I spent a full day in London with Jean, the first time we've seen each other since 2020. We mostly work async, swapping context in voice notes, which honestly I love, but it is still nice to see each other in person. We had fun - the Tate Modern, and Six the Musical. She also bought me a "Trader Joe's snackbox" - I had heard about it so much in our Navigating the AI Shift podcasts, that I really wanted to try one.

Speaking of DRI Your Career, we continue to build it out. The second cohort of our EM course just started, the next DRI Your Career cohort starts July 13, Navigating the AI Shift is now on demand, and we have a couple of partnerships in the works I'm so excited about. Six months in to trying to make this something real, I feel like we have a baseline to build on.

Still deep in replatforming for Twill. I feel like a developer for the first time in a while - orchestrator in one terminal, merge queue in another, me in the third trying to be clear about what actually needs doing. Wrote about that - and what I'm learning here.

Still processing completing LSE's MBA Essentials - and that post pushed a friend and I into conversation on how to keep going - so Claude and I reverse engineered an MBA curriculum we could take more cheaply, and in pieces. The next course starts this week.

Community has been a theme for the past month. Both from travel - I was in Antwerp and London and saw people IRL. And digitally, I'm on the committee for next.app devcon in Berlin this October. Also happy to be part of the coaching scholarships program.

Finally, and excitingly, soon I'll get to describe myself as Irish (rather than "aspirationally Irish" - my current go to). I'm in the final stages of bureaucracy for Irish citizenship.

What I've been reading

Reading a lot of terminal output lately, and fewer actual articles (too many of which had their valid point buried in an excess of generated verbiage). Something to address.

• Wise Effort by Diana Hill. This one spanned both May and June. It's about setting yourself up to thrive by allocating your effort according to your strengths (or "genius"). Which I think is about not blindly following capitalism's shoulds, but working out what actually lets you do your best, and building for that. A recurring theme, perhaps because I need the reminders.
• The great flattening - a good piece by an employment lawyer on the rush to delete middle management. "When you remove the manager, you don't remove management. You just redistribute it." You can offload the organising and monitoring to AI - I have - but not strategy, and not career development. Being a good software engineer just got harder, not easier. So if you flatten away the managers, who's actually helping people get good at the evolving job?