Why am I doing this.

On unemployment, borrowed advice, and returning to the only thing that was ever actually mine.

This is the most honest thing I have published here. It is also the beginning of something different.

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I have been unemployed. Looking for work in this market, with bills arriving and too many unknowns, is exhausting in a way that quietly reshapes how you think. It gives you a very reasonable excuse to stop writing a book.

To let a Substack publication go quiet. To tell yourself, focus on the practical thing first, the other things can wait.

I had those conversations. Many of them. Sensible people giving sensible advice.

But the more I talked, the more I read back what I had put out here, the more I noticed something. The conversations I was having with people I was mentoring, with engineers building a movement for women in tech, with leaders who are composed in public and exhausted in private those conversations were not waiting. They were happening. And they were the most alive I felt.

So I stopped for 24 hours and did nothing but think. Let the memories come. The hard moments, the disappointing ones, the ones I would not trade for anything. Fifty pages of a book I may have to rewrite. Fragments of ideas I kept starting and not finishing. And underneath all of it, the question I could not stop returning to: is any of this actually me, or is it the weight of other people’s advice about how to grow, what to post, which framework to follow?

I had become, slowly and without noticing, a quieter version of the thing I was trying to push back against. Performing leadership rather than practicing it.

What brought me back was simple. I love helping people. The joy of a mentoring session usually free, always worth it when someone gets the job, finishes the project, or just says thank you. That is not a strategy. That is what I am actually for. And leaving something behind that my children might read one day that beats the lottery. I am sure of it.

But I also needed to be honest about something harder.

In tech, most leaders are salespeople in public and deep human beings in private. I have sat in enough rooms to know this. The gap between the face they show and the person they actually are is not weakness it is the cost of a model that puts all the weight on one person and asks them to look certain and composed at all times.

I used to admire some of those people. Now I mostly see the gap. CEOs who know their products are causing harm and say nothing. Who manage shareholders while a generation grows up inside systems engineered to hold their attention hostage. That is not leadership. That is the opposite of it.

And I spent months trying to replicate the success of people I was quietly losing respect for. While writing about the importance of being original. I noticed that eventually.

Shared leadership is not a perfect idea. Nothing is. But it is the most honest answer I have found. Put the map on the table. Hear other voices. See people at arm’s length, not from above. Remember that technology is there to enhance the human, not replace it and that we, the people building these systems, are responsible for human lives, not algorithms.

AI is not the danger. AI is showing us that we could free ourselves from centuries of poor management and poor leadership, if we choose to. That is the door I have opened. There are more in front of me.

I do not know exactly what this publication becomes from here. But I know it will be honest. And I know it is mine.

If any of this sounds like something you have been carrying too I would like to hear it.

One more thing.

I am going to change some things around here. The sections, the rhythm, what is free and what goes deeper. I want to make sure the direction feels right not just to me, but to the people I am writing for.

So I will be reaching out. Sometimes with a survey. Or just a conversation. If you have been reading and something has stayed with you, or something has felt off, I want to hear it. That is what shared leadership looks like in practice you do not redesign the map alone.

If you want to be part of that conversation, reply to this post or send me a message directly. I read everything.

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About the Author
Tino 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.

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