Three vignettes

I visited the San Francisco office where about half my team works. It's a lovely space and I've been there many times. I was in California enjoying a short holiday with my wife after we dropped our kids off with their cousin at a sleep-away camp and so getting some extra face time with my team seemed like a good idea to me.

As with many tech offices, employees have badges that give them access to the building. I've had my badge since I joined over four and a half years ago. When I went to swipe in, the gates did not budge.

That's strange, I thought.

Luckily the security office was just a few feet away. I walked in and explained I was having trouble with my badge.

The security team member asked to see my badge, which I handed over. Then they started typing into their computer.

Oh, I'm being fired. I thought.

Security asked me a few questions about how long I've worked there and how long I've had the badge. But they were not offering a lot of information.

Weird that this is how I'm being fired. I thought.

I am not sure how much time went by – maybe a minute, maybe a few minutes. I found myself seeking relief and joked, Hey, I'm not fired am I?

Security shared that I was in good standing, which was nice to hear. But also does that mean that some people do get fired this way? It's not like they said, no that's never how it works.

It was a small thing. And I'm actually pretty good at my job. I get good ratings year after year. I make valuable contributions to the team. And yet it feels so precarious that a badge malfunction can trigger utter panic.

I work with a very important user who reported that a request their system was sending to ours was not receiving the response that they were expecting. They asked me to explain why.

This immediately set off feelings of panic and dread because my first assumption was that I must have broken something. That is a weird first thought because I also know that I didn't actually change anything related to this user's integration, so there could not have been a way for me to have broken it.

Perhaps someone on my team broke something?

I shared, I'm going to take a look, and commenced my investigation. After about 20 minutes of debugging, looking at the request, the logs and chatting with Claude, I landed on a suspicion: their request was failing because they were using a test API key and not a production API key.

That made me feel a little resentful because I had felt a level of panic and stress that was probably the result of user error. Rather than saying, Hey, I think you messed up, and I'm proud of this framing, I said, can you please confirm for me that the API key you are using begins with sk_live (secret key live) and not sk_test (secret key test).

They replied, Yes, our mistake.

That was a lot of stress in about a 30-minute period for nothing.

They changed the key then messaged back, We're seeing something else. When we first were using this API, the response looked like this, and now it looks like this.

There was a subtle difference between the two responses they shared. And then I really started to sweat because I thought the issue was just the API key.

I started investigating and I felt the same level of discomfort maybe even more so because how could there be another issue on their end?

This time I homed in on the issue after searching for a few minutes. My predecessor had left a comment in the code right where this issue was originating. The comment literally said that this section of code was really hacky and would break in the exact circumstance reported by the user.

I responded in the thread, Sorry, this is a miss on my end. I see the issue and I should have a fix working pretty quick. From identifying the change to shipping it was maybe two or three hours.

The API response returned to the expected shape that they had been building against.

If you just hear those facts, you might get a sense that I'm competent because it's not like I wrote that code. I had never seen that code before. I inherited that code.

A user that I work with was having a problem with our system. I debugged the code that I hadn't written. Figured out the solution, shipped the solution and it worked. I did that all in a matter of hours, while doing a couple other things simultaneously. That suggests competence, right?

But the feeling that I have is that I'm incompetent – that I'm about to be found out. A competent person would actually have done it even faster or have prevented it from happening in the first place.

I was having a one-on-one with my manager. He is a great manager – a strong communicator with a lot of domain expertise. I was sharing a delay that we were facing because of an external partner, and he asked a question.

It was a very good question, very technical. I answered it the best I could. And then he followed up with another question. And then I started to tell myself a story.

Okay, my manager thinks I'm incompetent. He thinks that the delay is my fault. He is probing for the edge of my knowledge of the system to confirm what he already suspects: that I do not understand the system sufficiently and should be replaced.

I was feeling like I was in the middle of an oral exam in my one-on-one. He was just rattling off questions and I was feeling more and more anxious. I'm sure there's a negative feedback loop here. The more questions he asks, the more I feel like it's an oral exam, and the more nervous I get. The more nervous I get, the worse my answers come across because I'm speaking less clearly.

After the fact, rationally I know that it is very normal for a manager to ask their direct report a series of questions in a one-on-one. Good managers ask technical questions so that they understand and can explain what's going on to a wider audience.

In the meeting, I was kind of assuming that my manager knew about the delay, but it could very well have been that he didn't know anything about it. I thought it was common knowledge across the team. But, it could be that he didn't know and so was trying to figure out what was going on and why.

And that's just normal manager practice. I know that rationally.

All of these cases I think I'm more or less coming off as competent and they're normal work situations. What's not normal and what doesn't feel great is the amount of anxiety and stress I feel in these situations.

If you can relate to that, if you're a competent person, objectively speaking, and yet you feel these moments of panic, existential self-doubt, and dread – how do you deal with it? How do you overcome it? Let me know. Thank you.