Seeing everything that’s wrong, with no power to fix any of it, is how smart people go bitter.
Consider an engineer at a large company who has read every strategy essay worth reading. He can see what leadership is getting wrong: the misallocated headcount, the product bet that won’t pay off. He is often right. Yet his days are spent on tickets someone else assigned, nobody acts on his suggestions, and the more clearly he sees, the angrier he gets. Reading was supposed to make him effective; it has made him miserable.
The easy reading is that he is a capable person trapped in a dull organization. Sometimes that is true. More often he has a condition worth naming. Agency is the ability to accurately understand where your circle of competency is and actively seek to expand it without over-reaching. Pseudo-agency is what happens when you absorb strategic frameworks from blog posts, books, and podcasts without having earned the practical experience to wield them. They give you an “unearned wisdom” that makes you feel entitled to positions of high agency, and the only way you can feel you are making impact is if you were in a leadership or executive position.
Why seeing doesn’t become fixing
The engineer’s insight covers only half the chain. He can identify a problem but has never had to size the fix, sequence it against everything else, persuade the people who would carry it out, and live with the result. What he has read is real, but it hasn’t been turned into the judgment that agency under uncertainty requires, so it piles up as identity instead. Organizations, reasonably, don’t run on theoretical ability. They run on proven ability, and even raw talent takes years to work up the ladder.
Part of what he lacks is an intuitive sense of importance. He sits in one box, the code, and sees only dimly the bigger boxes around it: the team, the market, the cash flows that pay for everything. He feels important only when tickets are assigned to him, and he doesn’t know how much he should be paid because he doesn’t know how much value he creates.
He also lacks an appreciation for the trade he has made. A large company provides health insurance, freedom from chasing clients, and room to specialize, and people running plumbing services and boba tea shops look on those benefits with envy. The pseudo-agent resents the very cushion he is sitting on.
Put together, these produce resentment rather than competence. He knows what he is against, the dysfunction and the mediocre leadership, but not what he is for, because he has never built anything from zero and discovered what actually matters.
Closing the gap
The obvious overcorrection, to stop reading and just do the work, throws away something real: the engineer can see the dysfunction. Not every engineer needs to be Sun Tzu, but each needs either good strategic intuition or, at minimum, awareness that strategy exists and willingness to defer to someone with better judgment. The worst case is a person with awful strategic intuition who thinks they are good. They waste everyone’s time in pointless discussions and eventually get disgruntled and quit.
The way out is to close the gap between knowing and doing by building something, even something small, that forces you to own the full chain of consequences. Trying to bootstrap a company teaches the whole chain at once: product, engineering, design, marketing, sales, treasury, team morale, mission, and a risky capital outlay you may only recover after 15+ years of work. When every dollar comes out of your own pocket, you learn quickly what matters, and the lesson runs both ways: it supplies the sense of importance the organization never taught, and it reveals what the large company was quietly providing.
The engineer is too aware to be content and too unproven to be trusted, and more theory won’t change either half of that. What changes it is getting your hands dirty somewhere the stakes are real and the feedback is immediate, where the gap between your model and reality shows up as a bounced check rather than a blog post disagreement. The open question is whether he pays that tuition himself, or keeps waiting for an organization to promote him past it.
References:
- Personal reflections on engineering judgment and the pseudo-agency trap