The Energy Leak | Article 0: The Logic of the Leak

We hire engineers for their brains, but we treat them like CPUs that can run at 100% forever.

It’s like buying a high-end server and putting it in a room with no fans. It’ll run fast for a while, but eventually, the heat builds up, the performance drops, and the hardware eventually just melts. You didn’t lose the server because the “work” was too hard; you lost it because the cooling failed.

The Human Battery: It’s Not Infinite

Writing code isn’t just “work”—it’s high-wattage mental processing.

• The Discharge: You only have a few hours of “Deep Logic” in you per day. Once that’s gone, you’re just typing; you aren’t solving problems.
• The Parasitic Drain: Burnout isn’t from coding too much. It’s from the “crap” around the coding: the 3 a.m. pages, the useless meetings, and the anxiety of a broken codebase. That’s a “short circuit” that drains the battery while you aren’t even working.
• The Hard Crash: If you drain a battery to 0% too many times, it stops holding a charge. When a Senior Dev hits this point, they don’t just need a weekend off—they need to quit.

Why We’re Losing Money

Most managers track “Velocity” (how much we ship). They ignore the Operating Temp (how close the team is to quitting). If you push a team to 100% for a month, you might ship that feature, but you’ll burn $1M in talent when your three best devs walk out the door.

The team isn’t “lazy.” They are Thermal Throttling. They are slowing down because they physically cannot run any hotter.

The 6 Fixes for the Human Hardware

As a leader, your job isn’t to “manage tasks.” It’s to keep the hardware running. To do that, we have to fix these 6 leaks:

1. The Decision Fatigue – Stop making devs “re-decide” every little thing. Standardize the basics.
2. The On-Call Trauma – Fix the noisy alerts. Stop waking people up for “warnings.”
3. The Cynicism Infection – When a team has been lied to by past leaders, they stop trying. You have to “clear the cache.”
4. The Invisible Labor – Recognize the “Glue Work.” The person fixing the docs and helping others is the only reason the system hasn’t crashed.
5. The Moral Injury – Forcing devs to ship “garbage” code is a logic conflict. It kills their drive.
6. The Recovery Gap – Realizing that a vacation is a “patch,” not a fix for a broken system.

The Bug Report

How do you know if you have an Energy Leak? Check the “telemetry” of your Slack or GitHub. If your best people are pushing code or replying to pings at midnight and 7 a.m., your system is overheating.

You are currently melting your most expensive assets.