Scared Every Time I Go to Work

It’s Q4 2026, and I’m scared shitless every time I go to work. I’ve been working full-time for seven years now. I thought that by this point I’d be a little less rattled by most things, but lately I don’t have much confidence in my abilities or much sense of being useful. A lot of days, I’m working without knowing what doing a good job would even look like.

What I do in 2026 is really different from what I did in 2025.

Last year, I was in the frontend chapter, focused on making development easier for other developers. I maintained podo, our company’s micro-frontend web framework, and split a monorepo into separate repositories. I also studied how React development servers work by building one myself. I did platform engineering too, structuring harnesses and turning design system code into specifications so we could build web apps quickly with AI.

This year, the entire frontend chapter disappeared. Development stopped on all the repositories I’d been working on. I stopped and handed over everything I was doing on the platform team and went off to build AI products. I designed the sequence in which agents make decisions and use tools, and developed server-side agent applications. I think it’s been over half a year since I last touched TypeScript. These days, I only work on native apps and Spring servers written in Kotlin. Building a feature means designing databases and understanding and working with how a search engine indexes data. More recently, I’ve also started doing AX consulting and FDE work: meeting clients, listening to how they’ve been doing their work, and figuring out how AI might change it.

Listing all this makes it sound like I’m getting a lot of varied experience, and I am, but most of the time I have no idea what the best choice is. So I currently see myself as someone who’s vulnerable and pretty bad at their job, and having to deliver results doing things I’ve never done before is stressful. A few examples might explain what this feels like.

Doing FDE work, I’ve found it difficult even to work alongside colleagues who’ve been good at client-facing work for years. In a client meeting, there should be moments when an engineer can contribute something technical, but I’m not quick enough to spot those moments and speak up, which makes me feel a bit like dead weight. A few times, I’ve needed a bit of a nudge to speak rather than taking the initiative myself. I also work with people who used to do HR consulting, and when I listen to them in client meetings, I’m amazed at how well they speak. The things I’ve been good at don’t immediately carry over into this field, so there seem to be more and more things to envy. I feel this urgency to contribute as much as I can with what I’m already good at while quickly catching up on these other skills.

FDE is something I’ve never done before, so I can sort of let that slide. But engineering, which has kept me fed for years, is also very much betraying and attacking me. It’s like I have some kind of career autoimmune disease. When I open a PR in a backend repository, colleagues with a backend background leave reviews. Those reviews include things I hadn’t considered at all while doing the work. Reading them brings a mild sense of despair: I didn’t even think of this. Is it okay for me to work like this? Before opening a PR, I try to think through as much as I can and study what I need to, but sometimes I still get peppered with review comments. It’s a little sad, and it makes me wonder what I should have done differently.

Getting an approval doesn’t put me at ease either. I can’t be sure this code is actually safe or okay to work this way, so I’m basically stuck in a no-win zone. Lots of review comments expose things I did without knowing enough, which hurts. An approval makes me wonder whether there are still problems I don’t know about. There’s a gap between someone else telling me it’s okay and understanding for myself why it’s okay.

The work does move forward, but the things I don’t understand keep piling up. I think I should study something over the weekend, but I’m lazy and don’t get much of it done. Using coding agents to do several things at once has made my weekdays more exhausting, so it’s hard to find time to study after work. I keep thinking I need to properly understand that thing I did a while back, but when am I going to do it? And I’m always running out of tokens.

There have been quite a few days when I’ve come home and beaten myself up, thinking I did a really bad job that day. What comes to mind first is a moment when I couldn’t speak like my colleagues in a meeting, or something I hadn’t thought of in a PR.

When I read posts on LinkedIn from people who’ve found a path by using AI well, or who’ve moved into entirely new roles and professions, quite a few seem to be saying, I’m finding an impressive new path in this tough world, look at how impressive I am and how well I keep up with the trends. But I bet they’re all having a fucking hard time. Maybe they’re all feeling what I describe here: the pain of feeling like dead weight as everything they used to be good at stops mattering, the anxiety of falling behind on their understanding debt, and envying the hell out of people who already have the skills they now need.

If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking, you seem to be doing fine, so why the fuck are you whining so much :( Well, this is just how I am. I’m not someone who can take on these challenges without getting so stressed, and I’m fucking jealous of people who can. Something I wrote before might help you understand me a bit better, but if you think I’m being dramatic, I can’t really do much about that.