What Therapy Taught Me About Being a Staff Engineer

Preface

Every year on New Year’s Eve, I take a few friends hiking to watch the sunrise from one of the nearby mountains. This year marks the fourth time we’ve done it together. While we primarily bond and enjoy each other’s company, these moments often spark reflections on both the closing year and the one ahead.

This year had it all. Ups and downs, wins and losses. I chased some dreams, and for some, I paid the price. Yet, I’m closing 2025 feeling happy and grateful for everything that happened, experiencing emotions I had been missing for years.

This year I also finished over three years of therapy – and unexpectedly, it changed how I work more than any course or mentor could. While it all could easily end up being a book, I’ll try to frame it into short and concise lessons that invite reflection. Here we go.

Love Is The Ultimate Answer

The therapy wrapped up with some significant breakthroughs. Although I still have plenty of room for growth in many areas, I believe I have finally started to love myself. Before that, every criticism – no matter if it came from myself or anyone else – felt like yet another proof of me not being good enough. The story of my life.

I still need to confront my demons, but whenever I see them approaching, I try to tackle the problem from a higher abstraction. I aim to give myself the same love and understanding I strive to provide for my kids.

Would I yell at my 4-year-old if he said he didn’t want to go to his swimming lesson today? Or would I try to understand why he feels this way and what has made him not feel like doing something he normally loves?

What would I do if my 8-year-old came to me in tears, saying she’s sad? Would I tell her to be quiet and do what’s expected? So why am I saying this to myself?

When you find yourself in a difficult situation, treat yourself as you would treat someone you love. This shift in perspective allows you to genuinely stand by yourself. That’s not being selfish. That’s doing what you should to be your best self.

The Time Is Limited

Cliché, I know. However, this year I finally understood that I cannot squeeze more hours in a day, and I need to start thinking about what’s really important to me.

I’m kind of a renaissance person. I like to explore a variety of topics, if not everything. I’m also super ambitious, and when I approach something, I give it my whole heart.

While I honestly love this aspect of myself, the problem is that one has only one heart, and I’ve reached a point where adding more things to my plate brings more and more opportunity costs. These have finally begun to hurt.

This wasn’t a gentle realization. I learned it through blood and tears – early depression and burnout from doing too many things with too much engagement. I won’t go into details, but trust me: no ambition is worth your mental health.

The lesson here is simple, yet hard to follow. Before committing to anything new, ask yourself if it is worth:

• Time you won’t be able to spend with your loved ones,
• Opportunities to grow in your current professional role, instead of jumping from one thing to another,
• Moments you could spend resting and recharging.

Turns out not only software architecture is about trade-offs.

Not All Problems Are Your Problems

I even put that on my wallpaper. ;)

This is perhaps the most important thing therapy taught me. I used to feel responsible for everything. If something went wrong, it was my fault. If something needed fixing, it was my job. I believed that with enough effort, I could control any outcome.

But here’s the truth: you simply cannot control everything, and trying to do so will always end in collapse.

Not sometimes. Always.

The math simply doesn’t work. There are more problems in the world than hours in your day, more variables than you can ever account for.

Accepting this felt like giving up at first. It wasn’t. It was growing up.

Once you stop trying to carry everything, you can finally focus on what actually matters – and do it well.

Pick Your Battles Wisely

The previous lessons apply to life in general. But they’re equally useful at work.

When I see an area for an easy improvement, I usually address it quickly. I’m also tempted to take on tasks that serve the greater good, especially when there’s no clear ownership or the owner can’t handle it soon. On top of that, I prioritize helping others over my own work. This often puts me in situations where I’m juggling many plates at once, and I learned the hard way that it often ends badly.

Unless we are talking about an outage, incident, or some really high-priority problem, nothing should be addressed immediately. This is not about bringing corporate etiquette to your startup or mid-sized company. It’s about allowing everyone to do their job in the best possible way by limiting context switching (or context overload), which always comes with costs.

It’s essential to understand – even if it feels counterintuitive – that by doing too much at once, you are effectively underdelivering. Not the opposite. Of course, there are exceptions to that, but they are extremely rare.

Measure Impact, Not Tickets

Before being promoted to Staff Engineer at Lokalise, I was an efficient and effective Senior Engineer. In the last review cycle, I was even recognized as one of the company’s top performers. This was a significant pillar of my self-esteem, which made the initial months in my new role unexpectedly challenging.

Therapy helped me see the problem clearly: I had been tying my self-worth to output. More tickets closed meant I was valuable. Fewer tickets meant I was failing. But staff engineering doesn’t work that way – and neither does a healthy sense of self.

While my vision of being a staff engineer could make for a great separate post, what truly resonates with me in the big picture is the concept of being a multiplier.

If you simply deliver tasks, you’re merely multiplying by one. And don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with that! In fact, sometimes that’s precisely what you should be doing. However, in most cases, staff work involves anticipating problems, building systems, shaping architecture, and tackling the challenging tasks that affect the lives of others.

Concrete example? This year I cut frontend CI test time by over half. One ticket, weeks of work, lower throughput in plain statistics – but that improvement impacted every engineer working with the monorepo. One ticket, substantial impact.

Remember, it’s not the ticket that matters – it’s the impact you create. Sometimes, changing a button color can noticeably enhance conversion rates, whereas a major feature you’ve developed over a quarter might never be released. This is the reality in IT. However, having a measure of the impact to refer to is always valuable.

You’re Your Company’s Culture

One thing that bothered me for a long time in remote work was feeling disconnected from real humans. No coffee-machine discussions, no spontaneous hallway chats. I used to think, “Well, this is just how remote work looks.” Therapy helped me see that I had more agency than I thought – not just in my personal life, but everywhere. Instead of accepting disconnection as the default, I started asking: what if I could make remote work look like I want it to?

Over time, I stopped seeing company values as boundaries for behavior and started seeing them as opportunities for action. What does it mean when your company prioritizes growth? Maybe it’s about creating space for others to grow.

The beauty lies in your power to decide whether and how to act on this. Your decisions and actions will shape your company culture more than you might expect. Embrace this.

Remain Human in the AI Era

A year or two ago, maintaining your own voice as a developer happened naturally. You wrote code, you made decisions, your fingerprints were all over your work. That’s no longer the default.

Today, keeping your tone of voice requires proactive effort.

If you’re not intentional about it, generative AI will do the thinking for you – and your work will start sounding like everyone else’s.

As developers, we make hundreds of small choices every day. They might seem trivial in the moment, but they add up. Ultimately, they determine if AI is going to multiply your expertise or slowly start to replace it.

The real gap lies in how you approach a problem before you even open a prompt window. It’s about what you accept, what you push back on, and whether the final output feels like you. Get those things right and AI becomes a genuine thinking partner. Get them wrong and you’re just generating noise at scale.

The goal isn’t to resist these tools – it’s to remain the author of your own work. To think with AI instead of outsourcing your brain to it.

Why This Post Feels Different

If you’ve read my previous posts, you might have noticed this one feels more personal. That’s intentional.

Writing openly about therapy and personal struggles is new territory for me. I’ve spent most of my blogging energy on technical deep-dives. Safe topics. But this year, I’ve changed my blog’s tagline to reflect a shift: I want this space to be more than just another engineering blog. A place where I share not only what I know, but who I am.

So here’s to a year of writing with more heart. If even one person reads this and feels a little less alone in their struggles, it will have been worth it.

Happy New Year. May 2026 bring you the lessons you need – even the hard ones.