Burnout leave, day negative 9:
🧟♀️
I met new stakeholders today. They spent the entire time asking questions about my teams of the security engineer (man) on the call, who answered the questions to the best of his ability.
He is not one of my reports, not on my teams. He did not redirect. I did not say anything.
I explained to a colleague recently that one of the things that changes as you get later in your career (especially for staff engineers and managers), is that the feedback loop gets much longer
Early career engineers build small changes and see impact from deploying to production. Later career engineers drive bigger scope strategies and initiatives that might take months or years to deliver. Managers operate by setting a vision and growing the capabilities of their engineers, and the changes we see in that growth can take more than a year to fully come to fruition.
But as a person who experiences stigma and often navigates a credibility deficit, burnout is really driving me to look forward to some spicy "I told you so" moments over the coming months, as rejected advice from years past loops back around
Burnout leave, day negative 8:
I'm so empty. I can't think clearly about work. I can still provide support to my reports because the mental pathways for curiosity, coaching, and mentoring are so naturally familiar. I'm ok but not great on maintaining my empathetic balance of empowering with setting direction for execution & delivery.
But my executive function is trash, and my capacity for decisions is exhausted.
But I came up with an idea that could help clarify some patterns in power dynamics of management
I'm not sure the axes are right — it's hard to translate and project the patterns in my head into euclidian space, let alone a Riemannian manifold, let alone 2 dimensions
This 2 dimensional euclidean space stuff is bullshit
Burnout leave, day negative 8:
I'm wracked with emotions. Taking extended leave is terrifying for a lot of reasons.
Stepping away from one of my teams is extra-hard for many reasons, not least of all that several of them came to the team because of me, and they'll be reporting to a different manager.
I joke about being an "insecurity princess", but the truth is that I'm generally relatively good at handling insecurity
What I'm really bad at is accepting powerlessness, or rather the inevitability of statistical distributions (beyond individual instances) to align with social power dynamics
I can't fix everything, that's fine. Sometimes I have to put in the work and things don't go my way, that's fine. It's the way it all adds up that I just can't accept.
Many years ago, I asked an employer for a minor process change. It had no cost in time or money, and no consequences beyond the people it would have helped. No zero sum game. It was entirely in their power.
Before I made the request, I shared my reasoning and explained the impact. They were receptive and understanding and wanted to support me.
They didn't change anything. They didn't want to take any action. They had a shallow excuse that didn't check out. They just didn't want to.
The patterns of this are variations on a theme. It gets exhausting trying to explain how these things happen in small ways a dozen times a day, to people who fundamentally don't want to believe that my experiences in the world are different from theirs — and thus becoming themselves yet another variation on a theme, contributing their own resistance to fuel the flames they claim happen somewhere else or differently or just not here
This happens in every place from every person, to varying degrees and frequencies. I accept that. I would like those distributions to shift in a healthier direction, and unfortunately, alas, they are not.
Burnout leave, day negative 7:
My therapist pointed out that the way I'm handling emotional and mental health now are qualitatively different from past cycles of intense stressors or retraumatization.
Case in point, both through managing reports and mentoring managers, I'm able to coach colleagues through healthier self-awareness of avoiding internalizing challenges via self-abandonment, while avoiding harmful forms of externalizing by leveraging constructive trust-building mechanisms like boundaries and explicit expectations and validation (owning mistakes, etc).
Which is all very tricky to navigate when there are both corporate power dynamics and social power dynamics.
Insecurity Princess 🌈💖🔥
Super Danicom
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