Happy holidays, picnickers!

At the start of 2025, shortly before I started the Picnic, I left a five-year stint at Amazon. My announcement of the departure is my second most popular LinkedIn post this year, topped only by this image of a particularly funny sandwich.

Now that the year lurches to an end, the dumpster fire that began in 2022 is only burning hotter. People who were laid off are exhausted from endless bait-and-switch of ghost job postings. Those who survived are forced to take on double or triple the work. Social media is full of people looking to career switch (into tech and out of tech; no one is happy anywhere).

And it’s easy to blame ourselves for these struggles. But the narrative that you can avoid the upheavals of the industry by simply being the best at what you do is a false comfort — and chances are that what you think of as merit isn’t even what executives are looking to reward anymore.

That is to say: shit sucks, and it’s not your fault. (In the spirit of the end-of-year wrap, I’ll be linking issues where I’ve covered the topics before; this one was in #26: Fear vs Play).

One of the things that working at Amazon made me realize is that even crushing it can be demotivating, when the goals you’ve been given are essentially meaningless. Working towards outcomes that nobody really cares about — not even the people who asked for them — is the fastest way to poison your company culture and encourage people to mentally check out.

And the most common source of these bad goals is bad leadership. When orgs are not cultivated with intention, the people who rise to the top are the ones you would want there the least. And these managers end up creating a double whammy of bullshit goals:

The effect of this dynamic is to elevate a select few individuals as modern-day shock workers, while suppressing the likelihood of organic bottom-up leadership emerging — which is the connective tissue that makes all of those “high performers” able to deliver anything in the first place (we talked about glue work in #21: The glue is the work).

Instead of owning the team’s value by placing people where they can do the most good, these mediocre managers are demanding that employees prove their individual value, all day every day. Which, predictably, takes additional time and mental energy.

So yeah! Everyone is burnt out. And burnout isn’t something that a holiday break can solve — or ought to solve. Because refreshing yourself just to come back to the same grind that crushed your spirit in the first place is self-defeating. Jen Dionisio’s reflection on her burnout is extremely powerful, and I urge everyone to read it, just in case you see yourself in it as well.

So take the end of the year as an opportunity for a reset, as people often do. Even if you don’t decide to change your job, you should still consider changing your relationship to that job, if the current relationship no longer nourishes you.

I don’t mean that in a hippie way; I am a firm believer in spite-driven personal development. But that spite can only give you energy, not direction. Direction can only come from thinking hard about what you want, and whether what everyone else is telling you that you ought to want has any overlap with the goals that actually matter. Sometimes (as in Nicole Johnson’s case) the solution is 180° from the “universal success story” of rising up the hierarchy in big tech.

To close out the issue with something nice: I’ve been following Ruth Malan’s systems thinking advent calendar as it has run its course through December. It’s an excellent toolkit for modeling your career, if you want to use it that way! But it’s also good for thinking deeply about pretty much anything else.

— Pavel from the Product Picnic