The Sound of Brittle Logic

The graphite snaps. It’s a sharp, brittle sound that cuts through the hum of the courtroom’s ventilation system. Alex L., leaning forward in the third row, doesn’t even curse. They just reach for another pencil. The sketch-a frantic, jagged rendering of a witness who can’t stop touching their tie-is 79% complete. This is the work: observation, translation, the capturing of a soul in a series of charcoal lines. But then there’s the pain. My pinky toe is currently screaming in a frequency only I can hear. I caught it on the edge of the mahogany desk ten minutes ago, and the throbbing is a reminder that the physical world is often just a series of poorly placed obstacles.

It’s the same rhythmic irritation I feel when I look at the git commit history from last night. Our manager, let’s call him Marcus, was the best backend engineer this company had seen in 2049 days. He could optimize a query while eating a sandwich and arguing about Star Wars. Now, he’s the ‘Engineering Lead,’ which is corporate-speak for ‘Person Who Attends Meetings and Then Ruins Your Evening.’ Last night at 11:59 PM, he pushed a series of changes to the core API. He didn’t need to. He wasn’t assigned to the ticket. He just couldn’t help himself. He saw a pattern he didn’t like-a pattern that was perfectly functional but didn’t match his personal aesthetic-and he ‘fixed’ it. In doing so, he broke the deployment pipeline for the entire junior team.

From Code to Chaos

It is a lie. It’s a systemic delusion that costs companies millions and costs talented people their sanity. I’ve watched Alex L. draw for hours. There is a specific focus required to translate a three-dimensional person into a two-dimensional sketch. If you asked Alex to suddenly manage the court’s scheduling software because they are ‘good at seeing things,’ the entire judicial system would grind to a halt within 49 hours. Yet, in tech, we do this every Tuesday. We promote based on past performance in a completely different discipline.

Management is not ‘Engineering Level 2.’ It is a career change. It is moving from the world of deterministic outcomes-where Code A leads to Result B-into the world of probabilistic chaos, where saying the wrong thing to a developer on a Monday can lead to a resignation on a Friday.

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The tragedy of the expert is the loss of the craft.

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The Dopamine of Control

Marcus is miserable. You can see it in the way he grips his coffee mug, his knuckles white, staring at a spreadsheet of ‘velocity metrics’ that mean absolutely nothing. He used to solve puzzles; now he solves ‘alignments.’ He used to build bridges; now he just stands in the middle of them, shouting directions at people who already know where they’re going. The frustration is palpable. When he micromanages our code, he isn’t trying to be a jerk. He’s trying to go home. He’s trying to return to the only place where he felt competent and in control. He’s reaching for the keyboard because the spreadsheet doesn’t give him the dopamine hit that a passing test suite does.

We have created a hierarchy where the only way to earn more than $169,999 is to stop doing the thing you love. It’s a trap. If you’re a world-class violinist, the reward isn’t being forced to conduct the orchestra while never touching a bow again. But in the cubicle farms, we insist on it. We take our 10x developers and turn them into 0.5x managers. It’s a net loss of 9.5x productivity, yet the HR department marks it as a ‘success’ in their annual report.

I remember a time when I worked on a project involving a highly specialized entertainment platform. Think about a system like tgaslot. Such systems are masterpieces of singular intent. They are designed, coded, and refined to do one thing exceptionally well: manage high-concurrency transactions and user engagement within a very specific set of mathematical parameters. The engineers who build those engines are specialists. If you took the person who optimized the random number generator and told them they were now responsible for the emotional well-being of the marketing team, the system would fail. Not because the engineer is ‘bad,’ but because the system is being misapplied. A specialized tool requires a specialized environment.

The Cost of Redundancy

Marcus doesn’t realize he’s a misapplied tool. He thinks he’s failing at being a manager because he isn’t ‘technical enough’ anymore, so he doubles down on the tech. He dives into the PRs. He leaves 89 comments on a single file. He suggests refactoring the entire authentication module two days before a major release. He is trying to heal his ego with the very thing that is wounding his team. My toe is still pulsing, a dull, heavy beat. I should have moved the desk, but I thought I could just ‘navigate’ around it. That’s the same mistake leadership makes. They think they can just navigate around the fact that their new manager has zero empathy and a 199-page manual on why everyone else’s code is wrong.

There is a specific kind of grief in watching a mentor become a micromanager. It’s like watching a star collapse into a black hole. They used to provide light; now they just pull everything into their own center of gravity, crushing it under the weight of their own insecurities. I’ve tried to talk to him. I sat in his office-which smells like stale tea and desperation-and tried to explain that the team needs him to handle the product owners, not the semicolons. He looked at me with the eyes of a man who hasn’t slept since 2019 and told me that ‘quality is everyone’s responsibility.’

He’s wrong. Quality is a byproduct of trust. When you hire someone to do a job, and then you pay a manager to do that same job over their shoulder, you aren’t paying for quality. You’re paying for redundancy and resentment. You’re paying for a $189,000-a-year editor for a $129,000-a-year writer. The math doesn’t work. It never has.

Sketching Trust, Not Rewriting Lines

Alex L. finishes the sketch. They hold it up, squinting at the proportions. It’s perfect. It’s perfect because Alex didn’t try to manage the witness; they just watched them. They didn’t try to rewrite the witness’s testimony to make it more ‘efficient.’ They respected the reality of the subject. Management, at its best, is a form of sketching. You observe the strengths of the team, you provide the frame, and you let the subjects fill in the lines. But Marcus is trying to grab the pencil out of all our hands at once. He’s trying to draw 9 different pictures on the same piece of paper.

The Needed Career Tracks

We need to stop rewarding excellence with irrelevance. We need ‘Staff Engineer’ tracks that allow the geniuses to remain geniuses without having to become babysitters. We need to acknowledge that the person who can fix the server at 3 AM is not necessarily the person who should be deciding who gets a raise in July. Until we do, we will continue to have teams led by people who are stubbing their toes on the furniture of human interaction every single day.

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Is it better to be a great teammate or a mediocre leader? The system demands the latter, but the soul craves the former. We are building monuments to inefficiency and calling it career progression. It’s enough to make you want to put down the pencil and just walk out of the courtroom entirely.

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