Why a Frontend Engineer Is Training to Become a Therapist

I'd worked my way up at multiple companies, changed stacks throughout the years, and reached Principal Engineer. There were still technical paths I could pursue. But when I thought about what mattered to me, the questions that kept surfacing weren't about code. They were about people: why brilliant engineers burn out, why some teams thrive while others fall apart, how to create environments where people can succeed.

For a while, I tried to ignore it. I optimized my productivity systems. I read books about purpose and meaning. I told myself I just needed a new technical challenge, that maybe I should switch teams, dive deeper into architecture, or finally tackle that side project. Maybe I could help my husband, Eric, build some features for his creative development community, OKAY DEV. But when I really examined what drew me to help him, it wasn't the technical implementation. It was wanting to support him, to see his community grow, and to watch people connect with each other. The code was just the vehicle for connection. Classic engineer solution: identify the bug, implement the fix. But I was starting to realize the "bug" wasn't technical at all.

And yet I kept approaching it like one. Optimize my productivity. Debug my motivation. Implement better systems. I'd been treating myself like code that needed refactoring. But I wasn't a system that needed debugging. I was a human being who'd spent over a decade defining myself by work, only to discover that the next rung on the ladder didn't actually interest me anymore.

When Life Forces You to Stop

Sometimes the universe doesn't wait for you to figure things out on your own. In 2024, within a few months, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. My dog died. My grandpa died. And suddenly, all the background noise I'd been living with (the vague dissatisfaction, the exhaustion that sleep or PTO didn't fix, the sense that something was off) became impossible to ignore.

That's when I finally started therapy. I was drowning under the weight of it all and didn't know what else to do. I'm not sure I would have even taken that step if it weren't for a colleague who'd been vulnerable enough to share their own experience with therapy. They talked openly about how therapy helped them, and that gave me permission to try it myself.

I think about this a lot now. If that coworker hadn't shared their story, I probably never would have started therapy. And I most certainly wouldn't be pursuing my master's in counseling. One vulnerable conversation changed the entire trajectory of my life. So much for the conventional wisdom about keeping colleagues at arm's length.

When I finally started therapy, the work began. I discovered patterns I'd been living for years without naming them: the perfectionism that made "good enough" feel like failure, the people-pleasing that meant I said yes to everything except what I actually needed, the way I'd learned to derive my entire sense of worth from being competent and useful to others.

And slowly, the fog began to lift.

The Thing That Started Shifting My Perspective

Before I fully recognized what was missing, there was accessibility work. At Work & Co, I worked with developers who fundamentally changed how I thought about technology. Their passion for accessibility was contagious, and eventually a few of us started an accessibility study group to help educate other developers on best practices. Not just teaching WCAG compliance, but helping people understand what accessibility really means. That a screen reader user's experience mattered as much as the pixel-perfect design comp. That our default assumptions about users excluded entire groups of people. That truly good engineering meant building for everyone.

I loved that work. It felt like it mattered in a way that shipping features for the sake of shipping features didn't. Building accessible software wasn't just a technical checkbox. It required empathy, perspective-taking, and recognizing that our lived experience wasn't universal.

But I also started noticing it was leading me somewhere: away from the technical elegance and toward the human impact. Away from "how does this work" and toward "who does this serve." The questions that kept me engaged were increasingly about people, not systems.

The Conversations I Was Actually Having

And then I started noticing the conversations that I couldn't stop thinking about. Some were with colleagues: informal chats about career anxiety, imposter syndrome, the exhaustion of always being "on." Others happened late at night scrolling through r/cscareerquestions and r/womenintech, reading posts from people struggling with the same patterns I'd lived.

The engineer who felt like a fraud despite being incredibly capable. The senior developer having panic attacks reading a mountain of pull request comments. The developers apologizing for not doing enough while working themselves into the ground. The women navigating the specific exhaustion of being "the only one" in technical spaces.

I found myself more engaged with these human struggles than with technical problems. I understood these struggles viscerally. Not because I had answers, but because I'd lived it. I understood the specific flavor of tech culture dysfunction: the way productivity culture masquerades as meritocracy, how "growth mindset" becomes gaslighting, why telling someone to "just set boundaries" is useless when the whole system punishes boundaries.

I still loved solving technical problems. But what kept drawing me back to those Reddit threads, those vulnerable conversations with coworkers, those struggles? It wasn't the code. It was the people.

Why Go Back to School?

These patterns weren't isolated to my experience. They were everywhere in tech. The colleague checking Slack and deploying a hotfix while on PTO. The way we all just accepted that burnout was the price of doing business. The layoff anxiety that hung over everything: the way a surprise all-hands meeting could send your heart racing, the colleagues who vanished overnight with no goodbye, the constant low-level dread that you might be next. The quiet desperation of people who'd done everything right and still felt empty.

And I watched the tech industry's response: meditation apps as employee benefits, resilience training workshops, articles about "managing your energy" and "setting boundaries." On-demand therapy platforms that pay therapists poverty wages while expecting 24/7 availability. Unlimited PTO policies that everyone's afraid to use. "Optional" after-hours team events that you're definitely expected to attend. All of it placing the burden on individuals to cope better with systems designed to break them. It clicked: this isn't a personal problem. This is systemic. And I wanted to understand it more deeply.

Therapy taught me that systematic thinking (my superpower as an engineer) has limits. Some things can't be solved with better processes or frameworks. Sometimes you have to sit with discomfort. Sometimes the work is learning that "good enough" is actually good enough. Sometimes the most important thing is being fully present with someone, not fixing their problem. I wanted to learn how to do that. Not just for myself, but to help people navigate it.

The more I thought about it, the more the path became clear. I wanted to become a therapist who could serve the people I understood best: tech professionals navigating burnout and career transitions, women in high-stress careers dealing with the specific pressures of being ambitious in systems that weren't designed for them. Someone who could speak both languages, who understood what it meant to hit Principal Engineer and feel empty, who got the specific dynamics of imposter syndrome in male-dominated fields, who knew firsthand that you can be successful and still be drowning.

So I applied to graduate programs for Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Got accepted. Started classes in August 2025, with graduation planned for December 2027 if all goes according to plan, all while still working full-time as an engineer and parenting a first grader.

Well, almost full-time. I'm fortunate to have a four-day work week, which means I have Fridays off. Before grad school, I'd spend those Fridays feeling like I should be doing something productive, never quite able to relax but also not doing anything that felt meaningful. Now I have a whole day dedicated to my studies, and for the first time in years, that day off actually feels purposeful. Eventually, I hope to use that Friday for counseling clients once I'm licensed, continuing my engineering work the other four days until AI inevitably replaces us all, at which point we'll really all need therapy.

The Permission I Didn't Know I Needed

Looking back, I realize the seed had been planted earlier. A good friend, a managing director and mom, had casually mentioned she was getting her MBA online. At the time, I'd thought, "Ugh, school." But watching her juggle it all must have worked on me subconsciously. Not because she encouraged me to do it (she didn't), but because she was living proof it was possible. You could be a parent with a demanding career and still choose to grow in new directions. I think I needed to see someone doing it before I could imagine it for myself.

What I'm Not Doing

Let me be clear about a few things:

I'm not leaving tech. I still love solving problems. I still get satisfaction from shipping features that help nonprofits reach more people. I still enjoy the technical challenges of frontend development. This isn't a "I burned out so I'm quitting tech" story. What I'm doing is expanding my understanding of the human side of technical work, because that's what feels most meaningful to me.

I'm not becoming a "tech therapist" (yet). I'm a student. I'm learning. I have years of training ahead before I'll be licensed to practice. Right now, I'm in that weird liminal space of being both an engineer and a counseling student, figuring out what that means.

I'm not here to fix you. This blog isn't therapy. I'm not your therapist. What I am is someone who's spent a long time in tech culture, who's now learning therapeutic frameworks, and who thinks those two perspectives together might be useful.

What I Am Doing

I'm writing about the intersection of tech culture and mental health. Some posts will be analytical, examining systemic issues like burnout, imposter syndrome, decision fatigue. Others will be more personal: what it's like to study existential theory while questioning your career identity, or how theories of human development hit different when you're living through them.

I'm documenting what it's like to juggle full-time engineering work, graduate school, and parenting. Not because I have it all figured out (I don't), but because the struggle itself is instructive. Perfect is the enemy of done, and I'm learning that lesson daily.

I'm exploring what happens when systematic thinking meets human psychology. Where they complement each other and where they clash. What engineers can learn from therapy, and maybe even what therapy can learn from engineering.

Why You Might Want to Read This

If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right and still exhausted, you're in the right place.

If you've been told your burnout is a time management problem when you know it's something deeper, this is for you.

If you're a high achiever in a high-stress career who's starting to wonder if there's more to life than the next promotion, I'm writing this for you too.

If you're mentoring people and finding the human conversations matter more than the technical ones, you'll probably recognize yourself here.

If you're curious about what happens when someone tries to bridge two very different worlds (systematic thinking and human complexity), stick around.

What's Coming

I can't promise a consistent posting schedule. (See: full-time work, grad school, parenting, trying not to model toxic productivity.) But I can promise authenticity. Everything here will be tested against the reality of living it.

You'll see posts on:

• Why tech culture creates burnout (and why individual solutions miss the point)

• What I'm learning in counseling courses that applies to tech work

• The reality of being multiple identities at once

• Why your exhaustion makes sense

This first post is already too long, which is very on-brand for a recovering perfectionist trying to explain why she's doing something before she's figured it all out.

But here's what I know: the technical ladder kept going up, and I wanted to grow horizontally too, not just vertically. The problems that energized me weren't just technical; they were human. And when life forced me to stop and look at what really mattered, I realized I wanted to understand both systems and the humans who build them. Not one instead of the other, but both together.

Thanks for being here at the beginning.