My friend and coworker Cameron Spencer sent me Scott Walker’s post, “What engineers are feeling right now and why we aren’t talking about it”, and it hit close to home.
Not because it was dramatic.
Because it was accurate.
A lot of engineers I know are carrying a quiet mix of pressure, fatigue, and uncertainty. Work has not slowed down. Expectations have gone up. Teams are leaner. Timelines are tighter. AI changed the pace again.
From the outside, many of us still look fine. Shipping. Posting wins. Staying active.
Internally, it can feel very different.
This part stood out to me most: we are not struggling because we are weak. We are adapting to a new environment in real time, often without clear language for what that adaptation costs.
I have felt that personally over the last year.
I can produce more than ever. I can build faster than ever. But speed does not cancel out emotional load. If anything, high output can hide it. People see the throughput and assume everything is stable.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it is just survival with better tooling.
Why don’t we talk about it more?
For me, it usually comes down to a few things:
- We do not want to sound ungrateful when we still have work.
- We do not want to look behind when everyone else looks “ahead.”
- We are trained to solve problems, not narrate how those problems feel.
- We are busy enough that reflection keeps getting deferred.
None of that is malicious. It is just culture plus momentum.
But silence has a cost. If nobody says the hard part out loud, everyone assumes they are the only one feeling it. That is how burnout becomes normalized and disconnected teams become the default.
The answer, at least for me, is not to make every conversation heavy. It is to make honesty normal again.
Small things have helped:
- Saying “this week is heavy” before pretending it is not.
- Asking teammates how they are actually doing, not just what they shipped.
- Separating output metrics from self-worth.
- Building routines that protect focus and recovery.
I also think we need a cleaner definition of strength in engineering.
Strength is not pretending uncertainty does not exist.
Strength is staying useful while being honest about reality.
That means continuing to learn, ship, and adapt while also admitting that this transition period is hard. Both can be true at the same time.
Scott’s post put words to something a lot of people are feeling. I respect that.
If you are in this season too, feeling a little off while still showing up every day, you are not broken and you are not alone. You are responding to a profession that changed quickly.
The goal is not to become emotionless. The goal is to stay grounded enough to keep moving.
