Not All Discomfort Is Growth
There’s a lie we’ve normalized in engineering orgs:
If you’re uncomfortable, you must be growing.
But discomfort without structure isn’t growth.
It’s unmanaged load.
And we keep calling it onboarding.
New hires are dropped into undocumented systems, half-written READMEs, and Slack trails that expire in 90 days.
Leadership calls it a “learning curve.”
But there’s no curve. Just chaos.
We romanticize ambiguity as a growth engine:
“That’s where you grow.”
“Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
But here’s the actual difference:
Growth is confusion followed by clarity
Dysfunction is confusion without recovery
The key isn’t comfort.
It’s whether the system turns pain into progress.
When that feedback loop’s broken:
Engineers internalize the friction
Leads misread silence as ramp-up
High-potential hires start disengaging—quietly
It’s not learning.
It’s leakage.
Growth requires stress + support + structure.
If you only have stress, you’re not training.
You’re straining.
If you’re a leader:
Track where every new hire gets stuck.
That’s your real onboarding map.
Patch the breaks.
Then stretch.
Don’t call it a “growth opportunity”
until you’ve built the system that earns the discomfort.
Prompt:
Where in your org is discomfort being mistaken for development?
And what would it take to turn that friction into forward motion?