Why Do Engineers Grieve Losing Hands-on Work?

Molly Graham thinks engineers grieve losing hands-on work because engineering has totally changed, probably one of the most visceral areas where jobs have genuinely transformed, and the grief is really real.

An engineer who had been at a company for a couple of years was no longer enjoying the role as much after a huge amount of change. The company had grown into a more structured environment, he was no longer sure what the current job was, and he missed engineering being more hands-on. Tara from OpenAI described the old job as rowing and the new job as steering. A lot of people want to row and do not want to steer. It can be hard to separate liking the rowing from fear that rowing is the only thing they will ever be good at, or from not knowing whether they can be good at steering. The same grief is showing up in a lot of disciplines.

A product leader called the push to become universal builders kind of lonely, and misses parts of the collaboration that have been a little bit stripped away because the work is now with robots all the time. Change sucks, and it can also be awesome. Nobody has to be a fluffy bunny about the change. There is a lot of power in saying the feeling out loud, which is a big chunk of what the Legos article did in naming the shift hard and scary.