The Human Cost of Mobbing All Day Work (Part 2)

Public Diminishment

For a genuinely senior engineer, the damage in a system of continuous availability is not limited to inconvenience.

A person can have decades of experience, published work, and deep mastery in one domain, then be placed into a public workflow built around unfamiliar tools, alien rhythms, and expectations. In that setting, the engineer's real strengths may become nearly invisible while every unfamiliarity is exposed in rotation.

That was part of what made this particular environment so painful. I wanted to be productive. I wanted to collaborate. I wanted to be a team player. The problem was not unwillingness. The problem was that participation in this model became cost-prohibitive. The environment demanded a form of visible contribution so poorly matched to my actual strengths that the effort required simply to remain legible inside the process began to crowd out the value I had been brought there to provide.

This was a brand-new federal greenfield project. I was the team's senior DevSecOps engineer. I "knew stuff" about security, and the theory was that my presence on the team would help make the project secure. That kind of contribution is not interchangeable with "can take a turn driving Java in IntelliJ on a rotation." Security judgment is not merely a matter of typing code in the team's preferred stack. It involves architecture, risk framing, pattern recognition, threat awareness, and knowing where danger likes to hide before the code has even fully taken shape.

A process that flattened that expertise into a generic engineering slot did not merely dehumanize me as a person. It suppressed the very judgment the project most needed.

It was like taking a golf champion like Tiger Woods, handing him a hockey stick, and dropping him into a Stanley Cup hockey game. His athletic excellence would not disappear, though the environment would make it nearly impossible for that excellence to appear in a recognizable form.

That is what bad management models do to skilled people.

They take domain-specific, embodied, hard-won expertise and relabel it as generic labor capacity. Then they arrange the work so that the person's non-native context becomes maximally visible while the native strengths become minimally usable. Then they misread the outcome.

In that kind of system, a highly experienced person can begin to feel inefficient, weak, ineffective, incompetent, or foolish, not because those judgments are true, but because the environment repeatedly translates non-native context into apparent weakness. The person struggles in public, the struggle is repeated all day long, and the process quietly treats that visible mismatch as evidence about the person rather than evidence about the design of the environment.

That is not development. It is public diminishment.

Never fully off-stage

One of the most corrosive aspects of these environments is that a person is never quite off-stage.

Even when muted, even when not speaking, even when not currently driving, the person remains tethered to the social machinery of the room. The awareness does not disappear. The body does not entirely relax. The mind does not fully descend into private concentration. One remains reachable, monitorable, and potentially on-deck.

That condition changes the entire character of the workday.

True deep work usually requires a kind of temporary disappearance. You enter the problem. The rest of the world recedes. You stop performing yourself to others. You stop managing the room. You stop preparing to speak. You are simply in the work.

Continuous managed availability prevents that state from forming reliably. It keeps part of the mind externally oriented. It turns what should be periods of inward technical reasoning into periods of inward reasoning conducted under outward surveillance.

I do not mean surveillance in the harshest possible sense. I mean something more ordinary and, in some ways, more insidious: the quiet pressure of being socially present for hours at a time simply because the system expects it.

That pressure is often underestimated because it does not always look dramatic. The engineer may comply. The Slack messages may be polite. The room may be calm. Yet the person still spends the day partially organized around being available to others rather than being immersed in the work itself.

This creates a low-grade but persistent state of vigilance.

The body ends up serving the process

The detail that troubles me most in models like this is often the simplest one: people end up arranging meals, restroom breaks, and moments away from the keyboard around the collaboration schedule.

That should stop us.

Once the human body must be threaded around the demands of continuous visibility, the model has crossed a line. It no longer looks like thoughtful collaboration. It looks like a process that has become too dominant.

There is a profound difference between discipline and colonization.

Discipline gives shape to work. It helps people coordinate. It creates rhythm, clarity, and mutual trust.

Colonization happens when the process spreads into areas of life and embodiment that should still belong to the person. When the workflow determines when you can step away, when you can eat, when you can use the restroom, and how long you can afford to vanish from view, the process is no longer serving the worker. The worker is serving the process.

That inversion matters.

It matters morally because people are not machine components. It matters practically because bodies under chronic constraint rarely produce their best thinking. It matters culturally because it teaches everyone in the system what is valued: visible compliance over humane design.

There is also something quietly degrading about having to calculate whether you have enough time to tend to ordinary bodily needs before your next turn in the rotation. It sends a message, even if nobody says it aloud. The message is that your natural rhythms are secondary. The system comes first.

Many organizations would never say that directly. Some still communicate it every day through the way work is structured.

Anticipatory vigilance

A fixed schedule of driver and navigator rotations adds another layer of strain that is easy to miss.

If the roles are assigned at the start of the day, then even when someone is not currently speaking, part of the mind remains attached to the future. When is my next turn? Can I step away now? Do I have enough time to refill my water? Can I settle into this problem, or will I be switching roles again before I get anywhere meaningful?

That is anticipatory vigilance.

It is not the same as ordinary time awareness. It is a more subtle fragmentation, because the person is never fully free of the next obligation. Part of the mind remains pointed toward the upcoming demand. The workday becomes a sequence of approaching visibility points rather than a stretch of open cognitive terrain.

This kind of structure can be particularly hard on people whose minds do not shift cheaply.

Some engineers can bounce rapidly between tasks, roles, and modes of interaction without much residual cost. Others pay for every transition. They reassemble context more slowly. They lose the thread more deeply. They need longer to descend into the problem and longer to recover after being pulled out. That is not a defect. It is simply part of the reality of different minds.

A mature workplace should know the difference between a process that keeps everyone engaged and a process that keeps everyone braced.

A constructive response

This experience affected me deeply enough that I eventually gave a company-wide talk on collaboration expectations, trying to explain that as a neurologically divergent introvert I genuinely wanted to be productive, collaborative, and useful, but could not do so well inside that model. Later, I helped found a Working Styles Guild where we met regularly to discuss how people with different neurological profiles could work more effectively together and with the organization.

I mention that only to make one thing clear: this is not an argument against collaboration. It is an argument for better collaboration.

The through-line was not withdrawal from teamwork. It was a desire to help the organization understand that people with different histories, strengths, and neurological profiles do not become better collaborators by being forced through a single least-common-denominator model of visible participation.

A humane engineering culture does not ask whether people are willing to contribute. It asks what kinds of structures let contribution actually emerge.

There is one more human cost worth naming here: organizations often misread silence as agreement.

In environments like this, the people most affected are not always the people most likely to speak publicly. Reserved people, politically exposed people, newer people, and people with less organizational capital may agree strongly in private while staying silent in group settings. That silence does not necessarily mean the cost is low. It may simply mean the people carrying the cost do not have enough safety, energy, or positional leverage to become public representatives of the problem.

That matters because visible dissent can dramatically understate the number of people living with the same strain. A team may appear aligned when what is actually present is private agreement paired with public caution. Once that happens, leadership can begin mistaking the courage of a few speakers for the isolation of a fringe view.

The irony is that environments built around constant visibility often remain very poor at surfacing uncomfortable truth. People may be seen all day long while still feeling unable to speak honestly about what the system is doing to them.

The human question comes first

There will always be leaders who want to move quickly to the business case. Does this affect throughput? Does it create rework? Does it lower quality? Does it hurt profitability?

Those are fair questions. They matter. I will address them separately.

Even before we reach them, though, a more basic question deserves to be asked:

What kind of work environment are we willing to normalize?

If a model demands chronic self-management, persistent visibility, bodily constraint, repeated public mismatch, and continuous low-grade vigilance simply to remain inside the team's workflow, then something important has already gone wrong. The cost may be hard to measure on a spreadsheet. It is still real. Human beings know it in their bodies long before management learns to name it in a dashboard.

That is why I do not think item 8 is a quaint relic about office comfort. I think it is one of the most human questions in the whole Joel Test.

The issue is not comfort in the shallow sense. It is whether the environment honors the realities of cognition, embodiment, expertise, and dignity. A team that gets that wrong may still look busy. It may still look aligned. It may still look collaborative.

What it may not be is humane.

And eventually, what it may not be is sustainable.