May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and seems a great time to talk about the engineer behind the engineering.
As a software engineer, I patch system vulnerabilities the moment they’re announced. I tune slow queries and refactor legacy code. Yet when it comes to the engineer using all of that, we tend to run untended for years.
Anxiety, resentment, cynicism, burnout: these affect the work you do as tangibly as a hardware failure. They show up in subtle ways. A nodded-through review. A decision passed up because it wasn’t worth the argument. A bug closed because the energy to chase it wasn’t there.
The work product carries the operator’s state, whether or not the operator notices.
When you catch yourself thinking “this is stupid”—about the codebase, the requirement, the meeting, the change—pause. That phrase is a red flag, not insightful analysis. Try a recalibration: “This is challenging, and there’s something here worth learning.” Not fake optimism: a deliberate swap of one thought for another that maps the situation more accurately.
Reframing is a skill, and like any skill, it can be practiced. The instinct to resist change is human, but change isn’t optional. The work ahead will ask for abstraction, adaptability, and the mental capacity to engage with the unfamiliar. You can’t bring those if your internal monologue is talking too loudly.
Patch yourself the way you patch your systems.