You Can’t Learn When You’re Trying to Survive
Why the pressure to deliver can become the pressure to stop thinking.
My boxing coach once told me something I’ll probably never forget:
“Be playful with your sparring partner. That’s how you experiment, make mistakes, and improve. The moment you’re afraid of getting hurt, you stop learning and start surviving.”
I’ve been thinking about how much this applies to engineering teams.
You can take things seriously while still having fun. But if you’re constantly anxious, shouting at people to GET THIS THING DONE NOW, and making every deadline feel like an emergency, people eventually stop seeing you as someone they can be comfortable around.
The relationship becomes a master-and-servant agreement. People stop experimenting, asking questions, or admitting they don’t understand something because they’re too worried about upsetting you.
And how are they supposed to learn like that?
Uri Goldshtein, CEO of The Guild, was one of the greatest CEOs and managers I’ve ever worked with. You could look at our team chats and see everyone making jokes, including Uri himself. People were allowed to poke fun at him, and he’d do it right back.
It felt like working with a friend whose trust and respect you didn’t want to lose, rather than an authority figure you were afraid of.
If your team can’t laugh at you, they can’t tell you when you’re wrong.
As a manager, you might be stressed about the company, a deadline, or something going wrong. You know what’s making you anxious, and you might think you’re just letting some frustration out.
But the person on the receiving end doesn’t have that context. They might take your frustration personally, start questioning their own competence, or become afraid of making mistakes.
And the less experienced they are, the harder it can be to separate your emotions from their actual performance. They start inheriting your anxiety and paranoia, even when the problem they’re trying to solve never required any of it.
This is where I think AI makes things even worse.
When someone is stressed about delivering, they stop approaching problems calmly. Instead of taking the time to understand what’s happening, they just want to get the thing done so nobody gets angry.
And now they have AI agents that can do exactly that.
They can prompt aggressively, ask the AI to fix whatever is broken, run the tests, fix the next error, and keep going until the PR is ready.
But how much did they actually understand? How much did they learn? And how much of what they shipped can they confidently explain or maintain without asking AI again?
I’ve done this myself. Under pressure, I’ve pushed until everything was green and couldn’t fully explain why it worked.
I worry we’re creating engineering environments where people are incentivized to delegate more and more of their thinking to AI.
Not because they’re lazy, but because they’re under too much pressure to slow down and understand things properly.
From the outside, it looks like incredible productivity. Lots of code, lots of PRs.
You can ship more code every day while understanding less of it every day.
None of this means lowering standards. You can push people, hold them accountable, and expect great work without making them feel attacked.
A lot of this comes down to how much of your own stress you pass on to the people around you. A smile or a laugh costs almost nothing, and the ROI is enormous. People relax, do better work, and actually have room to learn instead of just getting through the day.
When you’re worried about getting punched, you’re not working on your technique.
You’re just trying not to get hit.