Friday Fun: The Living Nightmare We Do Not Want to Have

Once, I had a dream. A bad one. I dreamt of hiring practices that felt… off.

In that dream, hiring followed a very particular set of rules.

Candidates were filtered before they were understood.
Decisions were made before problems were even described.

In that world, proximity matters more than capability.
Being local outweighs being relevant.
Presence is mistaken for contribution.

It sounded inefficient. Almost absurd.

But stay with it.

In that same world, hiring does not prioritise people who have faced reality.

Not those who have seen systems fail under pressure.
Not those who have rebuilt under constraints.
Not those who understand that delivery is not theory, but friction, trade-offs, and consequences.

Instead, hiring rewards alignment with expectations.

Familiar profiles.
Predictable trajectories.
Comfortable conversations.

People who fit the process.

Not people who challenge it.

It does not stop there.

This world gradually optimises for the wrong traits.

Effort becomes optional, as long as perception remains intact.
Ownership fades, replaced by participation.
Execution becomes fragmented, distributed across roles that dilute responsibility.

The people who go the extra mile start to look excessive.
The ones who stay within boundaries start to look “balanced”.

And over time, the system selects for exactly that.

Then comes the final layer.

Hype replaces substance.

We hire for:
– frameworks instead of fundamentals
– vocabulary instead of understanding
– trends instead of engineering depth

We build teams that can talk about systems.

But not operate them.

At this point, the outcome becomes predictable.

Delivery slows down.
Complexity accumulates.
Decisions take longer, while confidence appears unchanged.

From the outside, everything still looks structured.

From the inside, nothing truly moves.

It felt like a nightmare.

So I woke up.

And realised this was not the real world.

Although… fragments of it exist.

You can recognise these traits, scattered across different companies.

On their own, they seem harmless. For now, they remain isolated. And that is precisely why we are still safe.

But systems drift when patterns connect.

It is on us, leaders, engineers, to make sure they never aggregate.

To ensure it remains what it should be: a bad dream.

This is not a Halloween story.

But perhaps it should be.

#Engineering #Hiring #Leadership #SystemsThinking #Tech