College taught me COBOL. In the early 2000s, I sat in a lab writing code on systems that the industry had already moved past. My classmates and I kept asking the same question: why are we learning this? The stuff that matters is happening somewhere else. Newer languages. Production systems. The real world.
Then I got lucky. A tech company ran a campus program. Suddenly I could see what they actually built with. What the code looked like at scale. It was eye-opening. Everything in my college curriculum looked ancient by comparison.
I left thinking half of it was garbage.
Once or twice in the past twenty years, I ran into a distributed system bug that made me think about memory allocation in a way that only made sense because of the concepts I learned in that COBOL class. Not the language itself. The thinking underneath it. How systems handle state. How variables live in memory. How data moves.
That’s when I realized something had shifted without me noticing.
The concepts weren’t useless. I just couldn’t see why they mattered. Nobody told me. Nobody showed me a distributed cache and said, “This is where you’ll need this knowledge.” I had to discover it by breaking things in production years later.
But here’s the thing. That’s not actually the problem I want to talk about.
The real problem started showing up around year five in the industry. I watched smart people stop learning. Not because they didn’t want to grow. Because they couldn’t. They were too exhausted.
In India, a factory worker clocks in at 8 AM and clocks out at 5 PM. That’s fixed. Done. Their time belongs to them after that.
An IT professional doesn’t have that luxury. Work doesn’t end at 5. It bleeds into 9 PM emails. Midnight incidents. The expectation that you’re on call. Always responsive. Always available. The work never actually depletes because more keeps coming.
I watched engineers sign up for part-time degrees and executive programs. Genuinely excited about upskilling. Three weeks later they’d fall off. Not because the program was bad. Because after eleven hours of work, staring at your laptop for another two hours feels impossible. The human mind has limited fuel. After you burn through it at work, there’s nothing left.
Then they’d get frustrated with themselves. Blamed themselves for not having the discipline. But discipline doesn’t matter when you’re running on empty.
This isn’t a motivation problem. This is structural. And almost nobody talks about it.
The industry frames upskilling as an individual responsibility. Take a course. Build a side project. Stay relevant. But it never talks about the reason people stop trying. The pace of work. The always-on culture. The expectation that if you can’t keep up, you’re replaceable.
That’s the trap. You enter the industry as a fresh engineer not knowing what normal looks like. You take the first offer. You work whatever hours they give you. You accept the pace because you have nothing to compare it to. Nobody tells you that some companies have built their entire model around extracting as much as possible from their engineers before they burn out and leave.
Then at year four or five, when you’re burned out, the industry tells you it’s your fault for not upskilling.
I wish someone had told me in college what the actual landscape looked like. Not just the technical landscape. The career landscape. What a sustainable pace actually is. How to read a job description and see the red flags. What to expect from a company. What to push back on.
That context would have changed everything.
If you know what sustainable work looks like, you can recognize when you’re in an unsustainable situation earlier. You can negotiate differently. You can choose a different company. You can actually build a career that leaves room for growth instead of running yourself into the ground.
And then maybe you’d have the mental space to upskill. Not because you found more discipline. But because you made a better decision about where you spent your energy.
That’s not idealistic. That’s pragmatic. It’s about giving people information so they can actually take control instead of waiting for the system to change.
I can’t fix the education system. That’s a massive slow problem. I can’t fix the IT industry’s always-on culture overnight. But what I do now is different. When I’m talking to early-career engineers, I explain the real costs. I show them how to spot when a place is sustainable and when it’s an extraction machine. And when they’re making decisions about their careers, I talk about pace first. Because everything else flows from that.
Upskilling programs exist in India. They’re actually good programs. The problem isn’t access. The problem is people are too burned out to use them.
Fix that first. Everything else becomes possible.