From the article: Reading this article, I had one of those "oh shit, I am in this photo and I don't like it" moments. I suspect it will be resonant for others here (hope you don't mind the ping,...
From the article:
When Preeti Malani, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, reviewed six years of data on loneliness among older Americans, one pattern kept surfacing: the people most likely to report chronic isolation weren’t always the ones you’d expect. They weren’t uniformly the unemployed, the homebound, or the widowed. A significant portion were people who had spent decades being deeply competent at their work, people others relied on, and who had structured their entire social existence around being the person who could solve the problem. When that structure shifted, more than one-third of adults aged 50 to 80 reported feeling lonely, and the rates were far worse for those dealing with physical or mental health challenges. The numbers confirm something I’ve watched play out for years in high-performance environments: competence builds a particular kind of solitude, and almost nobody warns you about it.
...
What I saw at JPL wasn’t unique to space operations. Competence creates a feedback loop that looks, from the outside, like success. You solve problems well. People bring you harder problems. You solve those too. Over time, your identity becomes load-bearing. You are the person who knows how the thermal model works, who can trace the fault tree back to its root, who remembers why a design decision was made seven years ago. You become essential.
Being essential feels good. It also restructures every relationship around you into a dependency. The conversations people have with you increasingly center on what you can do for them. The social exchanges become transactional without anyone meaning them to be. You’re included in meetings because you’re needed, not because anyone thought about whether you’d enjoy being there.
...
Think about it in systems engineering terms. In a well-designed system, every component has a defined function. The more reliable a component is, the less attention it receives during nominal operations. You monitor the parts that might fail. The parts that always work become invisible. That’s good engineering. It’s terrible social architecture.
People who are consistently competent become the reliable components of their social and professional systems. They’re counted on. They’re not checked on. The difference between those two things is the entire gap where loneliness lives.
...
Competence is lonely because we’ve built environments where being good at things is rewarded with more responsibility and less connection. The better you get, the more you’re used. The more you’re used, the less you’re known. And the less you’re known, the harder it becomes to say the simple thing that would break the cycle: I’m not fine. I need something I can’t build for myself.
Reading this article, I had one of those "oh shit, I am in this photo and I don't like it" moments. I suspect it will be resonant for others here (hope you don't mind the ping, @SteelPaladin).
Footnote: Watchers of The Pitt can see Dr. Robinavitch as an archetype of the problem. He's the load-bearing expert that everyone relies on, but he can't allow himself to connect with anyone beyond the relentless demand that they become competent as well. From his standpoint, that might be a desperate cry for help and relief from a crushing burden. From everyone else's perspective, this can be a brutalizing and inhumane set of demands, yet Robinavitch is who the system has created. He's effective from the standpoint of delivering live patients, and dreadfully alone.
I’m struggling with this right now. I’m the competent person in regards to much of our software and I’m desperately trying to get other people competent because I just want to be an average...
I’m struggling with this right now. I’m the competent person in regards to much of our software and I’m desperately trying to get other people competent because I just want to be an average engineer for once. As some of those quotes said, I’m nervous whenever someone outside of my team talks to me at work, since it’s usually because they need something and not because they just want to talk to me. I find myself in miscellaneous meetings and on miscellaneous projects all the time and I just want to build some features instead of consulting everybody else on their features and workflows :(
My manager has been good about listening to me and we have taken strides to improve this for me, but I’m still sick of it. On one hand, the job security feels great when the world is like it is, but I often daydream about going to another job where I can just masquerade as an entirely unremarkable employee and just cruise for once.
I feel you, but I'm not sure there's any retreat available to being an entirely unremarkable employee. The personal qualities that got you to the level of reliable competence don't go away - you...
I feel you, but I'm not sure there's any retreat available to being an entirely unremarkable employee. The personal qualities that got you to the level of reliable competence don't go away - you can't stop seeing patterns and details, you can't easily suppress the desire to build interesting things or fix challenging problems. And you've probably found that many of your coworkers aren't wired that way, which is a PITA because (for me at least) the only way to stop caring is to burn out.
I've worked a long time in healthcare tech, and tried to de-stress by moving into a branch of the industry that seemingly wasn't involved in life and death systems and full-time competence wasn't so critical. Lo and behold, my employer started selling life and death products, and that's what I'm working on again. I'm now getting dragged into the program increment meetings - having the ability to say, "no, don't do it that way, do it this way" is actually more isolating.
It also sounds like you're being squeezed into a "glue employee" role, if you're being dragged into all the connector work that bridges the features and workflows into what you produce. Getting stuck doing product manager work at the same time as engineering work just because you're generally good doesn't mean you should have to wear more hats or fill in the communication gaps.
Yeah, this is why I just daydream about it, I suspect I will overachieve anywhere and end up with the same problem. I’m thankful, at least, of a good work life balance so that I can maintain a...
Yeah, this is why I just daydream about it, I suspect I will overachieve anywhere and end up with the same problem. I’m thankful, at least, of a good work life balance so that I can maintain a good social life outside of work. You’re right that I notice I’m wired differently than many of my coworkers. That’s not to say I’m better in the slightest. I’m surrounded by brilliant engineers, but they solve problems in different ways to how I solve problems and it means we live different work lives.
I do worry about being a “glue employee” as AI becomes more ingrained in software development. My company claims we don’t judge based on lines of code, numbers of MRs, etc, and only care about output, but it’s very clear that we’re becoming more metrics driven and, while current leadership knows I’m important, what happens in 5 years when we have different leadership and metrics show I don’t do as much, even though I know I’m one of our most valuable employees? I guess I’ll have to hope word of mouth continues to carry.
Have you considered the possibility that you are better? For instance, have you seen your coworkers take credit for work they did not do, or blame other people for problems that they, themselves,...
Have you considered the possibility that you are better? For instance, have you seen your coworkers take credit for work they did not do, or blame other people for problems that they, themselves, caused? I think that it's very common for good and competent people to head into work, see other people in ways of life that they find horrible, and then insist "well, I'm no better than these people" against all evidence. I think this is a mix of "egalitarianism," the bigotry of low expectations, and "don't hit me!"
I've seen a lot of highly competent people denounce themselves for things that other people do. One guy is vibecoding constantly and releasing a constant stream of unreviewed slop that doesn't work; the guy who fixes it denounces himself because 20% of the bugs are still getting through. Obviously the person who is actually trying to fix the process is in deep tension with the people who are trying to exploit it. They can only pretend to be friends.
This might be more personal to me (although it's happened so many times I don't think so) -- but I have to point at a social dynamic that seems relevant. In every workplace I've ever been at, there was a quiet conspiracy of the neurotypical employees against the neurodivergent ones, and there was manifest -- or even explicit bias. The workplace divided neatly between the people who had "street smarts" and the people who had "actual smarts," and the "street smarts" crew benefited hugely from open corruption and a playful willingness to gaslight the people who got the job done.
This is something I'm very pessimistic about -- and note that I don't know you! -- I'm speaking out of my own negative personal experience. This combination of features in my own work life made me feel very isolated until I started to accept that I just had very little in common with the people around me and that what they were doing was deeply shortsighted and self-destructive.
I've worked in big enough organizations to have crossed paths with the "street smarts" crew - some of whom were probably diagnosable Machiavellian sociopaths. But most of them are just playing the...
I've worked in big enough organizations to have crossed paths with the "street smarts" crew - some of whom were probably diagnosable Machiavellian sociopaths.
But most of them are just playing the game that competent technical specialists miss or devalue: the money game. They're acutely aware of the business reasons for the technical choices, what they need to do to max their contributions to KPIs, and how corporate power works. They are highly competent in their self-service, and the organization tends to replicate their apparent success. It's not long-term healthy for the organization, the people delivering the product, or the customers, but it's what C-suite sees, B-schools teach, consultants promote, and the stock market rewards.
And yes, this often involves gaslighting capable people, taking advantage of any vulnerabilities, stealing credit, and throwing people under the bus instead of taking responsibility for their own errors.
At the end of the day, if I cared about what I was doing, they were just obstacles to be worked around, so I suppose I was doing my own bit of Machiavellian strategizing.
To the extent that this doesn't describe your current coworkers -- thank goodness. To the extent that this does describe them -- I'm so sorry!! That's incredibly rough. I certainly cannot...
To the extent that this doesn't describe your current coworkers -- thank goodness.
To the extent that this does describe them -- I'm so sorry!! That's incredibly rough. I certainly cannot recommend trying to make nice with people who behave like this, though, because it is beneficial to them for you to feel that you're inferior and they make money by stomping on your face.
Oh, they're still around, but one of the things I love about being an IC again is that they're much less often my problem to deal with. I tip off my manager when I see them coming, though, and...
Oh, they're still around, but one of the things I love about being an IC again is that they're much less often my problem to deal with. I tip off my manager when I see them coming, though, and I've got a thicker skin than I used to.
I feel like the root issue is that people (in America) don't value equal, adult friendships. This is what happens when your entire social circle is work + family. People depend on you at work,...
I feel like the root issue is that people (in America) don't value equal, adult friendships. This is what happens when your entire social circle is work + family. People depend on you at work, your family depends on you at home.
It doesn't have to be this way, you don't have to move out to the middle of nowhere suburbs so you can have a backyard the size of Wales for your kids to frolick in.
It feels like in America there's this accepted wisdom that as you grow older, your life will revolve entirely around your family and kids and that's the expected and only path, which just isn't true. You can have kids, and you can have friends that you hang out with outside of work, and it is usually much easier to do when you don't live in the middle of nowhere.
Out of curiosity, those that see themselves in this article, are you the type that Work becomes all encompassing? I ask because I see this in people I know. My sibling is highly competent, but all...
Out of curiosity, those that see themselves in this article, are you the type that Work becomes all encompassing?
I ask because I see this in people I know. My sibling is highly competent, but all she does is work, her life centers around it and not much else. She goes in early, stays late and does paperwork at home. She's a doctor, so I can appreciate the need to take care of her patients, but I rarely see her and she rarely sees my kids and doesn't socialize much at all.
I also have a friend, who was my colleague at one time, who seemed lonely for a period and a large part of that (they could answer for themselves, if they see this post) felt to me like it was because they were very engaged with work, often working even when home. This is another person I would consider highly competent.
But in my friends case, they finally had an epiphany that what we were doing wasn't crucial, wasn't life saving and the company didn't actually give a shit about us (I'm going to credit myself with trying to hammer this into them for the years we worked together) and since then has very much expanded their social group and become something of a social butterfly, I'd say.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that highly competent people are also Workaholics and this is what often compromises other areas of life, such as being social and I can see that leading to loneliness.
I worked increasing hours until I had a breakdown and now under the advice of my clinician I forcibly timebox to 8 hours on weekdays. This isn't my preference (I work on a healthcare system and...
I worked increasing hours until I had a breakdown and now under the advice of my clinician I forcibly timebox to 8 hours on weekdays.
This isn't my preference (I work on a healthcare system and emergency response from me has guaranteed at least one patient access to treatment that they wouldn't have otherwise received) but if I give an inch one day I'm expected to give a lot more than an inch the next day. The minute I make myself "available," the number of emergencies caused by my coworkers escalates to fill the exact amount of availability I have offered.
(Put another way: there is an exact personality type that hears "You'll work weekends to fix my bugs?" and replies by orchestrating weekend outages.)
Healthcare tech really gets under your skin - it's incredibly validating to think that what you do makes people's lives better, and might even save a few. However, it was forcibly brought home to...
Healthcare tech really gets under your skin - it's incredibly validating to think that what you do makes people's lives better, and might even save a few. However, it was forcibly brought home to me that it's not worth devaluing our own lives (and sacrificing our family or other relationships) to serve that particular Moloch.
Also, contemplate kicking the ass of whoever pushes to production on a Friday.
I'm not a great example because part of what makes me more competent at what I do also includes social handicaps. I know there are others here in the ASD group who have trouble forging social...
I'm not a great example because part of what makes me more competent at what I do also includes social handicaps. I know there are others here in the ASD group who have trouble forging social bonds easily, but are deeply engaged and find fulfillment in problem-solving.
I've certainly been a workaholic in the classic sense you describe - I used overwork to avoid personal conflict and feelings of failure. But I'm a little better now (thanks, therapy!) at having family relationships, hobbies, political engagement, and social circles outside of work.
Uhm... I guess I am one of them. 90% of the chats I have with my colleagues start with "hey, how are u? By the way there is this problem I know you can easily solve. Could you please help?" Said...
Uhm... I guess I am one of them. 90% of the chats I have with my colleagues start with "hey, how are u? By the way there is this problem I know you can easily solve. Could you please help?" Said in one single breath.
On one side I kind of appreciate being helpful but on the other I dread the moment they won't call me anymore considering I know the trigger to connect with me is the problem... And without that they won't even think of me :/
You might be assuming that less capable people know what questions to ask, or how to assess the reliability of LLM results. Part of being the competent resource is immediately understanding the...
You might be assuming that less capable people know what questions to ask, or how to assess the reliability of LLM results. Part of being the competent resource is immediately understanding the context, answering the questions people didn't know how to ask, giving reliable results, providing broader framing of the problems to make them more easily solvable in future, or assuming responsibility for systemic troubleshooting or redesign.
Competence is definitely alienating. I thought being smart, calm, and capable would make it easier to connect with people, but like the essay says, you'll just end up problem solving for people....
Competence is definitely alienating. I thought being smart, calm, and capable would make it easier to connect with people, but like the essay says, you'll just end up problem solving for people.
Also, where do competent people hang out? I want to meet more people whose attention spans haven't been destroyed by TikTok lol
I wish I knew the answer to this question! (I think patience_limited might be right that this is a good spot, but I'm really not here often enough to know.) I kind of have just collected people I...
I wish I knew the answer to this question! (I think patience_limited might be right that this is a good spot, but I'm really not here often enough to know.) I kind of have just collected people I trust and can work with as I've met them online. Something that made a big difference: I used to get a lot of socially awkward feelings when I liked someone and then re-contacted them in a second place -- now that mostly doesn't stress me out, so I can sometimes hold onto those relationships for longer.
From the article:
Reading this article, I had one of those "oh shit, I am in this photo and I don't like it" moments. I suspect it will be resonant for others here (hope you don't mind the ping, @SteelPaladin).
Footnote: Watchers of The Pitt can see Dr. Robinavitch as an archetype of the problem. He's the load-bearing expert that everyone relies on, but he can't allow himself to connect with anyone beyond the relentless demand that they become competent as well. From his standpoint, that might be a desperate cry for help and relief from a crushing burden. From everyone else's perspective, this can be a brutalizing and inhumane set of demands, yet Robinavitch is who the system has created. He's effective from the standpoint of delivering live patients, and dreadfully alone.
I’m struggling with this right now. I’m the competent person in regards to much of our software and I’m desperately trying to get other people competent because I just want to be an average engineer for once. As some of those quotes said, I’m nervous whenever someone outside of my team talks to me at work, since it’s usually because they need something and not because they just want to talk to me. I find myself in miscellaneous meetings and on miscellaneous projects all the time and I just want to build some features instead of consulting everybody else on their features and workflows :(
My manager has been good about listening to me and we have taken strides to improve this for me, but I’m still sick of it. On one hand, the job security feels great when the world is like it is, but I often daydream about going to another job where I can just masquerade as an entirely unremarkable employee and just cruise for once.
I feel you, but I'm not sure there's any retreat available to being an entirely unremarkable employee. The personal qualities that got you to the level of reliable competence don't go away - you can't stop seeing patterns and details, you can't easily suppress the desire to build interesting things or fix challenging problems. And you've probably found that many of your coworkers aren't wired that way, which is a PITA because (for me at least) the only way to stop caring is to burn out.
I've worked a long time in healthcare tech, and tried to de-stress by moving into a branch of the industry that seemingly wasn't involved in life and death systems and full-time competence wasn't so critical. Lo and behold, my employer started selling life and death products, and that's what I'm working on again. I'm now getting dragged into the program increment meetings - having the ability to say, "no, don't do it that way, do it this way" is actually more isolating.
It also sounds like you're being squeezed into a "glue employee" role, if you're being dragged into all the connector work that bridges the features and workflows into what you produce. Getting stuck doing product manager work at the same time as engineering work just because you're generally good doesn't mean you should have to wear more hats or fill in the communication gaps.
Yeah, this is why I just daydream about it, I suspect I will overachieve anywhere and end up with the same problem. I’m thankful, at least, of a good work life balance so that I can maintain a good social life outside of work. You’re right that I notice I’m wired differently than many of my coworkers. That’s not to say I’m better in the slightest. I’m surrounded by brilliant engineers, but they solve problems in different ways to how I solve problems and it means we live different work lives.
I do worry about being a “glue employee” as AI becomes more ingrained in software development. My company claims we don’t judge based on lines of code, numbers of MRs, etc, and only care about output, but it’s very clear that we’re becoming more metrics driven and, while current leadership knows I’m important, what happens in 5 years when we have different leadership and metrics show I don’t do as much, even though I know I’m one of our most valuable employees? I guess I’ll have to hope word of mouth continues to carry.
Have you considered the possibility that you are better? For instance, have you seen your coworkers take credit for work they did not do, or blame other people for problems that they, themselves, caused? I think that it's very common for good and competent people to head into work, see other people in ways of life that they find horrible, and then insist "well, I'm no better than these people" against all evidence. I think this is a mix of "egalitarianism," the bigotry of low expectations, and "don't hit me!"
I've seen a lot of highly competent people denounce themselves for things that other people do. One guy is vibecoding constantly and releasing a constant stream of unreviewed slop that doesn't work; the guy who fixes it denounces himself because 20% of the bugs are still getting through. Obviously the person who is actually trying to fix the process is in deep tension with the people who are trying to exploit it. They can only pretend to be friends.
This might be more personal to me (although it's happened so many times I don't think so) -- but I have to point at a social dynamic that seems relevant. In every workplace I've ever been at, there was a quiet conspiracy of the neurotypical employees against the neurodivergent ones, and there was manifest -- or even explicit bias. The workplace divided neatly between the people who had "street smarts" and the people who had "actual smarts," and the "street smarts" crew benefited hugely from open corruption and a playful willingness to gaslight the people who got the job done.
This is something I'm very pessimistic about -- and note that I don't know you! -- I'm speaking out of my own negative personal experience. This combination of features in my own work life made me feel very isolated until I started to accept that I just had very little in common with the people around me and that what they were doing was deeply shortsighted and self-destructive.
I've worked in big enough organizations to have crossed paths with the "street smarts" crew - some of whom were probably diagnosable Machiavellian sociopaths.
But most of them are just playing the game that competent technical specialists miss or devalue: the money game. They're acutely aware of the business reasons for the technical choices, what they need to do to max their contributions to KPIs, and how corporate power works. They are highly competent in their self-service, and the organization tends to replicate their apparent success. It's not long-term healthy for the organization, the people delivering the product, or the customers, but it's what C-suite sees, B-schools teach, consultants promote, and the stock market rewards.
And yes, this often involves gaslighting capable people, taking advantage of any vulnerabilities, stealing credit, and throwing people under the bus instead of taking responsibility for their own errors.
At the end of the day, if I cared about what I was doing, they were just obstacles to be worked around, so I suppose I was doing my own bit of Machiavellian strategizing.
To the extent that this doesn't describe your current coworkers -- thank goodness.
To the extent that this does describe them -- I'm so sorry!! That's incredibly rough. I certainly cannot recommend trying to make nice with people who behave like this, though, because it is beneficial to them for you to feel that you're inferior and they make money by stomping on your face.
Oh, they're still around, but one of the things I love about being an IC again is that they're much less often my problem to deal with. I tip off my manager when I see them coming, though, and I've got a thicker skin than I used to.
(I adore that! I think that's deeply valid.))
I feel like the root issue is that people (in America) don't value equal, adult friendships. This is what happens when your entire social circle is work + family. People depend on you at work, your family depends on you at home.
It doesn't have to be this way, you don't have to move out to the middle of nowhere suburbs so you can have a backyard the size of Wales for your kids to frolick in.
It feels like in America there's this accepted wisdom that as you grow older, your life will revolve entirely around your family and kids and that's the expected and only path, which just isn't true. You can have kids, and you can have friends that you hang out with outside of work, and it is usually much easier to do when you don't live in the middle of nowhere.
Out of curiosity, those that see themselves in this article, are you the type that Work becomes all encompassing?
I ask because I see this in people I know. My sibling is highly competent, but all she does is work, her life centers around it and not much else. She goes in early, stays late and does paperwork at home. She's a doctor, so I can appreciate the need to take care of her patients, but I rarely see her and she rarely sees my kids and doesn't socialize much at all.
I also have a friend, who was my colleague at one time, who seemed lonely for a period and a large part of that (they could answer for themselves, if they see this post) felt to me like it was because they were very engaged with work, often working even when home. This is another person I would consider highly competent.
But in my friends case, they finally had an epiphany that what we were doing wasn't crucial, wasn't life saving and the company didn't actually give a shit about us (I'm going to credit myself with trying to hammer this into them for the years we worked together) and since then has very much expanded their social group and become something of a social butterfly, I'd say.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that highly competent people are also Workaholics and this is what often compromises other areas of life, such as being social and I can see that leading to loneliness.
I worked increasing hours until I had a breakdown and now under the advice of my clinician I forcibly timebox to 8 hours on weekdays.
This isn't my preference (I work on a healthcare system and emergency response from me has guaranteed at least one patient access to treatment that they wouldn't have otherwise received) but if I give an inch one day I'm expected to give a lot more than an inch the next day. The minute I make myself "available," the number of emergencies caused by my coworkers escalates to fill the exact amount of availability I have offered.
(Put another way: there is an exact personality type that hears "You'll work weekends to fix my bugs?" and replies by orchestrating weekend outages.)
Healthcare tech really gets under your skin - it's incredibly validating to think that what you do makes people's lives better, and might even save a few. However, it was forcibly brought home to me that it's not worth devaluing our own lives (and sacrificing our family or other relationships) to serve that particular Moloch.
Also, contemplate kicking the ass of whoever pushes to production on a Friday.
I'm not a great example because part of what makes me more competent at what I do also includes social handicaps. I know there are others here in the ASD group who have trouble forging social bonds easily, but are deeply engaged and find fulfillment in problem-solving.
I've certainly been a workaholic in the classic sense you describe - I used overwork to avoid personal conflict and feelings of failure. But I'm a little better now (thanks, therapy!) at having family relationships, hobbies, political engagement, and social circles outside of work.
Uhm... I guess I am one of them. 90% of the chats I have with my colleagues start with "hey, how are u? By the way there is this problem I know you can easily solve. Could you please help?" Said in one single breath.
On one side I kind of appreciate being helpful but on the other I dread the moment they won't call me anymore considering I know the trigger to connect with me is the problem... And without that they won't even think of me :/
Have you noticed people are coming to you less in the last few years since AI became more prevalent?
You might be assuming that less capable people know what questions to ask, or how to assess the reliability of LLM results. Part of being the competent resource is immediately understanding the context, answering the questions people didn't know how to ask, giving reliable results, providing broader framing of the problems to make them more easily solvable in future, or assuming responsibility for systemic troubleshooting or redesign.
Competence is definitely alienating. I thought being smart, calm, and capable would make it easier to connect with people, but like the essay says, you'll just end up problem solving for people.
Also, where do competent people hang out? I want to meet more people whose attention spans haven't been destroyed by TikTok lol
The answer to that question would be: here. You're welcome. 😏
I wish I knew the answer to this question! (I think
patience_limitedmight be right that this is a good spot, but I'm really not here often enough to know.) I kind of have just collected people I trust and can work with as I've met them online. Something that made a big difference: I used to get a lot of socially awkward feelings when I liked someone and then re-contacted them in a second place -- now that mostly doesn't stress me out, so I can sometimes hold onto those relationships for longer.