Engineering

Why Engineers Burn Out The engineer sits at their desk, staring at a screen they’ve stared at for thousands of hours. The code compiles. The tests pass. But something has broken—not in the system, but in them. Engineering burnout is not merely exhaustion from long hours. It is a particular kind of depletion: the erosion of meaning, the collapse of curiosity, the slow death of the joy that once made debugging at 2 AM feel like solving puzzles rather than serving a sentence. ...

I’ve been thinking about what Friedrich Nietzsche would make of modern software development practices. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become: he would have despised Agile. Let me explain. The Eternal Recurrence of the Sprint Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence asks: would you live your life exactly the same way, infinite times over? It’s a test of affirmation — do you love your life enough to embrace its infinite repetition? ...

Code review is ostensibly a technical practice. We review code to catch bugs, ensure quality, share knowledge. But after years of reviewing (and being reviewed), I’ve come to believe something different: Code review is primarily a psychological exercise. The code is just the medium. The real work is navigating human emotions, social dynamics, and cognitive biases. Why Criticism Hurts (Even When It Shouldn’t) When someone critiques your code, your brain doesn’t distinguish it from personal criticism. Neurologically, social rejection activates the same brain regions as physical pain. ...