You See, Some Push Boulders, Others Watch From LinkedIn

Dear reader,

The holiday season is hitting different here in Southern Italy.

Between the endless family meals (trust me, we take Christmas food seriously down here) and wrapping up 2024, I’ve been reflecting on my journey into creating content on social media. I met incredible people and I’m closer to finding my tribe. And yet, something’s been bugging me lately.

There’s a weird disconnect in our industry, and we don’t talk about it often. I’ve spent almost a decade in tech, and I keep seeing this same pattern play out. Every day, my social feed is flooded with thought leaders talking about groundbreaking AI, pair programming and TDD, while most dev teams I know are just trying to keep their legacy code from falling apart. Not only, some teams are still begging management for basic stuff like automated testing.

Reality hits different than the LinkedIn timeline. Even among developers, there’s this invisible line in the sand. You’ve got the passionate ones, always pushing for better practices, fighting the good fight. Then there’s the “clock in, clock out” crowd, happy to go with the flow. The passionate ones often burn out trying to drive change from their individual contributor roles, while the others cruise along, unbothered.

It’s like we’re running two different races on the same track.

This whole situation got me thinking:

Are we setting ourselves up for burnout by trying to be both engineers and change advocates? I’ve been there, sometimes you just want to build good products without feeling like you’re pushing a boulder uphill.

Is this just how things are going to stay? Sometimes it feels like we’re stuck in this loop.

What happens when folks who’ve never shipped a line of code keep making decisions for what they don’t understand?