Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

We went roller skating with my wife, and had an overall chill weekend. I hope you had a great weekend as well! We're also preparing to see the Dodgers vs. the Giants series this week.

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Meta Reports 4x Higher Bug Detection with Just-in-Time Testing. I always read these reports with skepticism, but I also had come across a similar idea at work, so it's probably worth looking into.
• Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering. Continuing on the principal engineer topic from last week.

Lately, I've had this feeling of being stuck. Part of it, at least for me, has not been the amount of work itself. I haven't been applying my recent learnings to how I work. I've been mostly sitting in the emotion of the moment, reacting to the pressure, and going through the motions.

That got me thinking that there are at least two different situations we often collapse into the same phrase: feeling stuck and being stuck.

Feeling stuck

Sometimes work feels endless. There is always another incident, another project, another decision that seems to land on your desk.

Even with supportive management, it can still feel like you are alone. You might feel like you are the only person accountable for the outcome, the only one making tradeoffs, or making decisions.

In practice, that usually isn't true. Most projects have more people invested in them than we think. Your manager cares. Product cares. Leadership usually cares too, especially if the work connects to broader goals.

When I start feeling this kind of stuckness, it usually means I need perspective more than I need heroics.

Ask for a sounding board

One thing that has consistently helped me is talking to peers.

Sometimes I don't need someone to solve the problem. I just need help figuring out whether I am being fair in how I'm seeing the situation. Am I expecting too much? Am I underestimating constraints? Am I turning a temporary inconvenience into a story about being permanently blocked?

A different perspective helps a lot here.

Most of the time, a good conversation doesn't remove the problem, but it changes my relationship to it. It helps me see what is actually blocked, what is making me uneasy, and what I can influence next.

Try a different path to progress

When we feel stuck, it can help to put the work back in context against other priorities.

Sometimes the thing you want to do might even be the right thing, but not the right thing for right now.

For example, you might want to rewrite an application on a new stack. You may be correct that it would improve reliability, developer velocity, or long-term maintainability. But if no one around you shares the same urgency, simply repeating the argument rarely helps.

At that point, it may be worth trying a different path.

You might present the problem to a broader audience. You might socialize it with your manager's manager. You might connect the work to another team's goals. Or you might build a small proof of concept that makes the value tangible enough for other people to react to something concrete.

Progress does not always come from pushing ourselves harder; there's only so much we can solve by doing everything ourselves.

Being actually blocked

Of course, there are times when this is not just a mindset problem.

Sometimes management is not supportive. Sometimes you don't have a coach, a mentor, or even a peer you trust enough to see if you're being unfair or reactive. Sometimes the environment is unclear, political, or simply unsafe.

In those cases, you may not just feel stuck. You may actually be stuck.

This is where all the talk about "high agency" can become a little too simplistic. Yes, it is useful to maneuver around obstacles and look for another route. But not every obstacle is yours to solve alone, and not every environment rewards good-faith effort.

Sometimes the right question is not "How do I push through this?" Sometimes the right question is "Do my goals still align with this team, this manager, or this company?"

And sometimes changing environments is the most rational move available to you. And if you're asking yourself if you should change, you probably already know the answer.

Your turn!

How do you deal with feeling stuck? And how do you tell the difference between feeling blocked and being truly blocked? Let me know by replying to this email!

Happy coding!