The doubt I didn't show him

I run a mentorship session most weeks with engineers from Africa. Good people, sharp, working through the same questions most engineers are working through right now, just from a place where the door already opens a little slower.

Last week one of them confided in me. He said, with all this AI stuff, he’s not sure he has a place in tech any more. Companies aren’t hiring. He’s been looking for a job for more than nine months. He said he thinks what he actually needs now is to learn how to vibe code, how to use chatbots better, that maybe that’s the skill now, not the thing he spent years building.

I told him to trust his worth.

Part of me wasn’t fully confident saying that. I stood by it anyway.

I told him, you need to trust yourself, no matter how hard things are right now. I’m supposedly the expert in the room and I carry these same doubts. Tech has changed. Companies have changed. Some of what we’re doing right now feels like it’s heading somewhere that won’t hold. I told him these things come and go. You stop for a while. You walk. You exercise.

You go back to it with fresh eyes, a changed strategy, more time actually talking to real people instead of a screen. We only live once, to my knowledge. Don’t keep knocking on the same door. Go make your own.

I meant every word of it. I also wasn’t sure, in the moment I said it, whether I believed it enough to have earned the right to say it to someone whose rent depends on the answer being true.

That’s the part I keep thinking about it. Not whether the advice was good.

But, whether I had any business being certain when I said it.

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About the Author
Diamantino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human, one verb at a time.