Disruptive Empathy

Why We Can’t Just “Hot Fix” Burnout in Tech

Eric Near — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:02:35 GMT

We work in an industry defined by optimization. We constantly tweak parameters, upgrade components, and chase marginal gains. If a system lags, we diagnose the bottleneck, apply a patch, and expect an immediate return to peak performance. That “hot fix” mentality serves us well with silicon and code. It fails us badly when we apply it to the human operating system.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades witnessing (and, let’s be honest, experiencing) the high-pressure crucible of the tech startup world. Hypergrowth is the goal, speed is the primary metric, and hustle culture is practically a feature requirement. We wear long hours and relentless focus as badges of honor. We tell ourselves we can “power through” another marathon coding session, another product launch, another funding round. Our lives shrink to two locations, the office (or the Slack workspace that replaced it) and home, and we treat our minds and bodies like hardware we can push to the breaking point without consequence.

But the human brain isn’t a server that can handle an infinite load. It doesn’t operate in a purely linear, computational fashion. It requires downtime, variation, and genuine rest. It also requires places to be a person beyond our job title. It has a fundamental, biological need for renewal.

That need is often especially pronounced for neurodivergent folks (hi, fellow AuDHDers). Sensory sensitivities, intense focus, and unique processing styles mean the standard, high-stimulation startup environment costs us significantly more mental and emotional bandwidth. Constant Slack notifications, pressure to mask during endless meetings, and sudden strategy pivots all demand exhausting cognitive recalibration. For us, renewal is a vital defense against sensory overload and eventual burnout (a necessity, and a luxury only in the eyes of people who have never needed it). The right third place, a quiet corner somewhere that belongs to neither work nor home, can be part of that defense.

So why does the industry consistently ignore or undervalue renewal?

The Performance Trap

Part of the answer lies in how we track performance. Our core metrics (lines of code, story points, feature velocity, ticket resolution time) are output-focused and easy to quantify. We glorify visible achievement and consistent “uptime.” Taking a break or slowing down looks inefficient. It looks like downtime, and we are wired to minimize downtime.

Notice what that logic does to our time. Every hour has to justify itself, so the places that once held our unmeasured hours (the coffee shop, the rec league, the congregation, the neighborhood bar) quietly lose out to either “just one more ticket” or a total disconnect from the world in favor of a few rounds of Marvel Rivals. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave these spaces a name in his 1989 book The Great Good Place: third places, the informal gathering spots beyond home (the first place) and work (the second). They have no output metric, which is exactly why a performance-obsessed industry treats them as expendable.

The result is a culture that quietly penalizes the behaviors behind sustainable success. We celebrate the person sending emails at 3 AM or working through weekends, but we rarely acknowledge the efficiency gained by returning to work truly refreshed. We also forget that breakthrough ideas often emerge during relaxed, unfocused thought (the default mode network doing its work, connecting ideas that focus keeps apart). Third places are where a lot of that unfocused thought happens, mid-conversation, with no agenda.

The Fallacy of Constant Uptime

We apply the same logic to our own work ethic, assuming constant focus and continuous output equal maximum productivity. Real productivity runs in cycles of engagement and renewal. Athletes prioritize recovery as much as training for a reason: without rest, muscles can’t repair and strengthen. Our cognitive functions follow parallel principles. When we neglect renewal, decision-making deteriorates, creativity suffers, and emotional regulation frays. We then make the kind of mistakes that take far longer to fix than the time we “saved” by skipping a break.

Renewal has nothing to do with laziness or a lack of commitment. It is maintenance: the human equivalent of planned downtime for system upgrades and preventive checks. And like any maintenance, it works best when it has a dedicated place and a regular schedule.

Where Renewal Actually Happens

Here’s a confession: when I finally do clock out, my default “recovery” looks a lot like collapsing in front of Netflix. It feels like rest. Often it leaves me exactly as depleted as before, just horizontal. My evenings had collapsed into two spaces, work and couch, with nothing in between.

Earlier this year I attended TEDxFranklin and heard Mridu Nagrath-Parikh offer a challenge that has stuck with me ever since. Trade in Netflix for what researchers call the third place: those spaces outside of work and home where you actually make connections (the cafe, the pickleball court, the Y). Her instructions were disarmingly simple. Show up, talk to one new person, and have no expectations. Then she added the part I appreciated most: it will be awkward.

I think that honesty matters, especially for those of us who find social situations expensive. Passive downtime can recover our energy for a while, while connection restores something different: a sense of belonging and perspective that no streaming queue can provide. A good third place offers a low-stakes environment with no sprint review, no performance metric, and no agenda. Oldenburg described these places as levelers, where rank gets left at the door and conversation is the main event. Nobody there knows your title or your velocity. You get to be a regular, which is a surprisingly powerful thing to be. For a tech industry that keeps people tethered to screens and Slack channels, that may be the most countercultural form of maintenance there is.

(For my fellow AuDHDers: the awkwardness is real, and so is the need to pace yourself. A familiar cafe at a quiet hour counts as a third place. One conversation counts. A recurring spot where the staff recognize you and you never have to perform counts most of all. The goal is a small, repeatable practice, and nobody is grading it.)

Redefining Efficiency: Renewal as a Critical Metric

If we want to build sustainable companies and sustainable careers, we have to treat renewal as a core component of productivity. That means disrupting some deeply held (and frankly outdated) cultural norms.

It starts with recognizing that a well-rested team is more creative, more collaborative, and makes fewer and less costly errors. Leaders need to model healthy behavior: take vacations, disengage on weekends, respect personal time. Workplaces need the flexibility to accommodate different needs for sensory downtime (essential for AuDHD inclusion). And we need to shift our focus from input hours to output quality and team well-being.

That shift should include the world outside the building. Leaders can protect the hours that make third places possible: no after-hours pings, no standing meetings at 6 PM, and real encouragement to leave on time for the pickleball court, the climbing gym, or the neighborhood coffee shop. Companies can even help build those places, through coworking stipends, community memberships, or simply a culture that treats “I have a thing tonight” as a complete answer.

We should be as disciplined about planning for renewal, individual and team-wide, as we are about sprint planning and product roadmaps. Put your third place on the calendar the way you would a standup. Yes, this is part of being human-centered. It is also strategic efficiency.

The human need for renewal is a fundamental requirement of the design, so treating it as a bug gets the engineering wrong. Ignoring it is simply bad engineering. So close the laptop, skip tonight’s episode, and go be awkward somewhere with other people. Your future self (and your team) will be better for it.

The Feedback They Almost Didn't Give You

Eric Near — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:00:31 GMT

There is a habit I picked up somewhere in the middle of my career, small enough that I almost don’t think of it as a habit. At the end of any feedback conversation, once my supervisor has said what they came to say, I ask if there’s anything else. The answer is almost never no.

Most feedback conversations are built around correction, because correction i…

Most Advice is a Memoir, Part II

Eric Near — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:03:17 GMT

Last time I wrote that advice is autobiographical: a story about someone else’s context, offered to you as if it were a set of instructions for yours. What I didn’t get into, because it deserved its own space, is what happens when the storyteller has a product to sell you at the end of the story. That changes the transaction completely, and it is happen…

More writing this week...

Eric Near — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:02:23 GMT

Saturday preview (took a tiny break this week, the good kind, not the ominous kind). Two posts landing soon.

The first is part two of “Most Advice Is a Memoir” (this one’s about job searching, and the very specific grift of being sold financial freedom in exchange for a $47 PDF that teaches you how to sell $47 PDFs).

The second is about feedback from supe…

Most Advice Is a Memoir

Eric Near — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:01:20 GMT

The most useful thing I learned about advice I learned too late, and the way I learned it was expensive. So here it is for free.

Advice is autobiographical. Every piece of it. The person giving it to you is telling you what happened to them, what they concluded from it, and what they would do again. They are not, and cannot be, telling you what will happ…

Your Strengths Outlast the Mission Statement

Eric Near — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:01:26 GMT

I used to post like I was in a hostage video.

Not literally. (The lighting was fine.) But if you went back through my LinkedIn content from my startup years, you would find a person who was enthusiastic in a way that had no texture, supportive in a way that had no specificity, and aligned in a way that, now that I am outside of it and can see it clearly,…

The Block Button Is Not a Career Decision

Eric Near — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:01:17 GMT

I want to talk about the six weeks I didn’t block someone, because I think that interval is more instructive than the block itself.

The situation was not complicated. Someone had been leaving comments on my posts that were designed, with some precision, to make me look like I was out of my depth. Not hostile comments (those are actually easier to deal wi…

The Perfect Solution That Never Ships

Eric Near — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:02:04 GMT

The best argument against doing the imperfect thing in front of you is that it isn’t perfect. I have watched entire organizations lose years to this argument, and I want to talk about what that actually looks like from the inside, because from the inside it doesn’t feel like paralysis. It feels like rigor.

There is a name for what I’m describing. The nir…

Stepping-Aside-As-A-Service

Eric Near — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:01:52 GMT

A few weeks ago I was at a business networking event, doing the thing you do after the formal part ends, which is stand near the coffee and make small talk with strangers while deciding whether your social battery has one more conversation in it. Mine did, as it turned out, and the conversation was a good one. I struck up a chat with a woman who had bui…

The Kindest Leader in the Room Can Still Build a Cult

Eric Near — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:01:42 GMT

I want to be careful here, because the person I’m describing does not exist as a villain in this story. That is exactly what makes this worth writing about.

Picture a leader who is, by any reasonable measure, the real thing. Not the LinkedIn version of empathic (which is to say: someone who posts about vulnerability and gives TED-style talks about psycho…

Disruptive Empathy

Eric Near — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:02:12 GMT

For the past few years, I've been writing about the things that shaped how I think about work (and people, and technology, and the strange overlap between all three). Those posts are turning into a book. Disruptive Empathy is about what happens when you bring genuine emotional intelligence into spaces that have historically treated it as a liability (st…

What We Gave Up When We Got Infinite Scale

Eric Near — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:01:24 GMT

I remember the hum of the server room in the early 2000s. It was a physical, vibrating thing (a literal heartbeat for the company) that required us to care for it with a level of intimacy that seems absurd now. If we wanted to grow, we had to go buy a Dell PowerEdge and physically bolt it into a rack. We were limited by the length of the cables and the …

The Wiring Beneath: Autistic In The Room

Eric Near — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:01:39 GMT

I remember the first time I realized that my Cisco switches and I shared a common language. They required a specific sequence of commands, a precise syntax, and they didn’t care about my tone of voice. In the quiet of a server room, the world made sense. There was a protocol for everything.

But the boardrooms and the “huddle spaces” of the startup world …

Why We Starve the Human Firewall

Eric Near — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:01:55 GMT

I was sitting at my desk recently, looking at a stack of compliance reports, and I felt that familiar, buzzing hum in my brain that comes when I’ve been staring at a problem for twenty years. It is a specific kind of frustration (one that my ADHD-i brain likes to fixate on) where the solution is obvious but the budget is nonexistent.

We talk a lot about …

The Wiring Beneath: The ADHD Tax

Eric Near — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:01:39 GMT

I used to think that my brain was just a series of poorly labeled patch panels. In the early days of my career (back when we were still crimping our own Cat5 cables), I assumed that if I just found the right cable management strategy, I could finally stop the signal interference. I thought that if I bought enough PalmPilots or organized my FileMaker Pro…

Need-to-Know Basis: On Hiring Capable Women and Then Making Them Beg for Context

Eric Near — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:01:25 GMT

There is a particular kind of hire that happens regularly in tech companies, usually when something has gone sideways. A team is failing to execute. A product is stalling. A function needs to be stood up from scratch, or a relationship has been mishandled, or the company has grown faster than its systems and now things are quietly on fire. Leadership lo…

Context Not Included

Eric Near — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:01:27 GMT

If you’re of a certain vintage (the vintage that spent considerable time staring at CRT monitors, that is), you probably remember that specific, jarring sound of a computer connecting to the internet via a phone line. That digital screech was the gateway to another world: a world built almost entirely out of words.

Before the era of sleek smartphone inte…

Read-Only Mode: On Working Alongside People Who Are Rebuilding Their Own Authority

Eric Near — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:03:02 GMT

There is a particular way some people hold their breath before they speak in meetings. Not the ordinary pause of someone collecting their thoughts. Something else. A scan. They are reading the room for permission, checking the faces of the people with authority before they commit to having an opinion. I noticed it for years, this pre-speech surveillance…

Why You’re Depressed After 5 Minutes on LinkedIn

Eric Near — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:02:39 GMT

There’s a specific kind of low-grade misery that settles in around the third or fourth scroll. You weren’t even feeling bad before you opened the app. You were fine. Maybe a little bored. But then you did it anyway, and now you’re sitting there wondering why your career feels like a participation trophy while everyone else is apparently disrupting indus…

Engineering Empathy in Post-Growth Startups

Eric Near — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:00:27 GMT

The first time I watched a senior engineer give their notice, I was sitting in an open-plan office surrounded by monitors. Half of them were displaying dashboards: service uptime, error rates, p99 latency, memory consumption across a dozen microservices. We knew, at any given moment, the precise health of every system we had built. We had alerts configu…