It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again.
Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on the API stuff, today I’m continuing with the API stuff, no blockers.” Fantastic. Groundbreaking information. Absolutely could not have been a single line of text.
You have a meeting on your calendar. It is thirty minutes long. There are six people invited. The topic is something that could be summarised in two sentences. By the time everyone joins, exchanges pleasantries, gets distracted, and finally discusses the actual subject, you have burned three person-hours of collective time.
That meeting should have been an email.
But wait. You sent an email. It was three paragraphs explaining a decision. Nobody needed to respond. Nobody needed to discuss. You just needed people to know something. Now six people have another email in their inbox, another thing to read, another context switch in their day.
Technical interviews do not predict job performance. We have known this for years. Study after study shows that whiteboard coding, algorithm puzzles, and system design interrogations have almost no correlation with how well someone actually does the job.
We keep doing them anyway. Why?
Because we went through them. We suffered. We ground LeetCode for months. We memorised sorting algorithms we have never used professionally. We practiced answering questions about designing Twitter’s backend despite never working at that scale. We did the hazing, and now it is our turn to haze.
Imposter syndrome is real. Plenty of people, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, genuinely struggle with feeling like they do not belong despite evidence to the contrary. That is a real thing that affects real people and deserves real support.
But somewhere along the way, the discourse around imposter syndrome went completely off the rails. It became a content genre. A personality trait. A thing people perform on LinkedIn for engagement. And I think it is doing more harm than good at this point.
Between 2022 and 2024, the tech industry laid off somewhere around half a million people. Not contractors. Not underperformers. Engineers, designers, product managers, entire teams deleted in a single afternoon.
People who had been told they were essential, who had stock options vesting, who had relocated their families for these jobs. Gone. Often via email. Sometimes while locked out of their laptops mid-sentence.
The industry has moved on. Hiring is picking up. The job market is recovering. But something broke during those years that is not coming back, and I think we are only starting to understand what it was.
I have been working remotely full time since 2018. Eight years. That is eight years of not sitting in traffic, inhaling the fumes of a thousand other miserable commuters while some breakfast radio hosts laugh at their own jokes. Eight years of being home. Eight years of being present for the moments that actually matter.
I watched my children take their first steps. Not on a grainy video my wife sent me while I pretended to care about Jira tickets in some open plan office. I was there. In the room. I saw it happen live. That is not a humble brag. That is the point. That memory exists because I was home, not because I got lucky with timing.
I learned early that a day job will keep you busy, but it will not always stretch you. If you want to move forward, you have to put in reps outside the clock. Not forever, not at the cost of your life, but long enough and often enough to build range.
I started in an agency. Fast pace, many clients, constant context switching. I worked late nights and some weekends because I wanted to get better. That is not a long term lifestyle and I do not recommend burning yourself out, but those seasons taught me how to ship, how to debug under pressure, and how to own the result. They also taught me to set better boundaries later. You can hold both truths: growth often requires extra effort, and health requires rest.
Almost two years ago I deactivated my LinkedIn. Not paused. Not lurking. Gone. I have not missed it for a single day.
I have never received a real opportunity through LinkedIn. The good work in my career has come through people who know me: former clients, colleagues, friends of friends. Conversations, coffee, shipping things together. In Australia especially, our circles are smaller than you think. Reputation travels faster than an algorithmic feed ever will.
For the past ten years, every good opportunity in my career has come through people. Former clients who referred me. Colleagues who remembered a job I did well. Friends of friends who needed help and trusted the recommendation. In Australia especially, the circles in tech are smaller than you think and the degree of separation is tiny.
If you build real connections, you can often sidestep the mess that is interviewing and get hired for the work you actually do, not for how fast you can solve an algorithm on a whiteboard. I am genuinely grateful for that.