Aligned (#12)

Some people make your work better.

He didn’t complain.

He didn’t ask why the iOS team had disappeared or grumble about the growing backlog. He didn’t posture or stall. He just opened Xcode for the first time and started carrying the load, quietly, methodically, like someone rebuilding a roof in the middle of a storm.

By title, he was an Android engineer. In practice, he was the team.

So when he reaches out asking for documentation, for clarity, for something solid to build on, I don’t hesitate. I drop what I am doing. Not because the task is exciting. Not because the pay is exceptional.

I focus my attention on him because someone like this is worth it.

He gives a damn. He works like it matters. The details and outcomes mean something to him.

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What the System Teaches You to Forget

Some people make the work feel inevitable.

They move with clarity. They carry weight. They sharpen the instincts of everyone around them just by showing up with care and focus. When you work with people like that, you don’t have to summon belief or pretend the work matters. It matters because they’ve already decided to treat it that way.

And once you’ve seen that kind of environment, even briefly, it’s hard not to notice when you’re somewhere else.

The pain isn’t always in the workload. It’s in the slow erosion of meaning when your clarity gets consumed, your best thinking is treated like a commodity, and your effort props up work that shouldn’t exist.

It’s not always unethical. It’s emptier than that.

You start to feel the absence of product soul. The roadmap is padded. The features are cosmetic. Strategy becomes performance. Teams optimize for churn, design around monetized friction, and package the result in investor slides.

This isn’t failure. It’s the plan.

Call it what it is: systematized indifference. From printer lock-ins to apps that gamify dysfunction, the market rewards teams for inventing artificial problems and selling the fix.

Stay inside that system long enough, and it changes you.

You get faster at delivering, but slower to care. You stop asking the deeper questions because you’ve learned they don’t matter. You trim your standards to stay sane. This misalignment has a cost.

Research shows that when people are forced to act in tension with their own standards of quality or meaning, it leads to fatigue, anxiety, and emotional detachment. Over time, your sense of purpose and your instinct to care suffer.

The documentation gets published. The sprint closes. The product ships. Everyone moves on, but you don't. You recognize you’re pouring high-integrity work into an environment that can’t hold it, doesn't value it, and won’t do anything meaningful with it.

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Inside a System You Can't Leave

When you are stuck inside this kind of system, it's sometimes hard to appreciate that it's functioning exactly as designed.

You sit in the meetings. You write the docs. You carry the load for teams that don’t carry much of anything. You watch strategy get reduced to slides, clarity buried under process, and care mistaken for overthinking. You stay because you’re part of the team, the product still has users. Sometimes walking away isn’t an option.

However, you still have leverage.

You still choose how and where you give your best. Even inside a compromised system, there are people who carry weight. There are moments where clarity matters. There are teammates who sweat the details because they want to build something real.

Start there. Give more to them.

And when the people in the room forget what serious work looks like, don’t follow their lead. Don’t let someone else’s erosion become your example.

Not everyone gets your edge. Even if you’re staying, you still get to decide what kind of professional you’ll be.