Opening Doors Without Breaking Your System
The empathy SLA
The startup world runs on a deep paradox. We preach the values of the Agile Manifesto (valuing individuals and interactions over rigid processes), yet we often treat our people like fungible resources (or worse, like server capacity that can be infinitely scaled up). I’ve spent twenty years on every side of the console (from infrastructure to product to leadership), and the most corrosive force I’ve seen isn’t a bad pivot or a zero-day exploit. It’s burnout fueled by mismanaged empathy.
The core tension is this: You can open doors of opportunity for people in need and still maintain healthy boundaries.
You want to help (and you should want to help). This isn’t just about being a good person (though that’s a nice side effect). It’s about building a durable, resilient organization. Opening a door for someone in need (a struggling junior engineer, a founder making a hard career shift, a student fascinated by the history of the Internet) is not a cost center, it’s a strategic investment.
It’s the human equivalent of finding Product-Market Fit (the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand) (https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-product-market-fit-what-startups-need-to-know) for talent. You see high potential and you connect it to a high-demand opportunity. This is leadership at its best.
But a healthy system (and I mean your system) requires guardrails. In the tech world, we use a Service Level Agreement (SLA) (an agreement between a service provider and a customer that defines the service to be provided and the performance to be expected) (https://www.atlassian.com/itsm/service-request-management/slas) to clearly define what we deliver, how fast, and what happens when we fail. Why don’t we apply this same rigor to our personal emotional capacity?
Your emotional boundary is your personal SLA. It’s the contract you have with yourself (and the people you’re helping) that ensures the service you provide is sustainable. The key to successful, non-destructive empathy is defining the terms before the request arrives.
That means setting a clear response time (I will answer your email within 48 hours, but I cannot drop everything for an unscheduled call) or defining the scope of support (I will mentor you on career strategy, but I cannot review your personal project’s code commits).
When you define your bandwidth, you avoid emotional debt. Unmanaged empathy, the kind that says “yes” to every urgent ping, leads to resentment and system failure. Resentment leads to the inevitable closure of the door, and that’s a tragedy for everyone.
The tech sector needs more open doors, not fewer. It needs more empathy, but it must be an empathy that is conscious, measured, and resilient. It needs an empathy that has a clear, well-written SLA, ensuring that the critical service (your capacity to care) has a 99.99% uptime. Anything less is a disservice to both the person you’re helping and the future of your own career.