A juggler with three balls on a misty and empty field

Being good at managing stress could be dangerous. Being good at preventing long term stress should be our aim.

The same way, testing the untestable looks good on your resume. Used careless, it is also a way to allow sloppy software design. The goal is code that is easy to test. Because code that is easy to test is easier to work with, long term. A powerful tool for testing can become a liability. Awesome testing skills become a danger, if it leads to code that had no design pressure.

We need skills for the life we have, including its stress and hard to test code. But don’t confuse necessity with virtue. To build the world we want to have, we have to hone skills for such a world. It can be removing the cause of stress or getting better at software architecture. It will make our old skills a bit less valuable. Allow yourself to grieve that. it will also require us to do things we are not that good at yet. It is ok to find that scary. Just don’t let today’s skills dictate tomorrow’s reality.

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