Humain

Helping people who work in technology
remember that they are people.

You chose this career for a reason. Maybe it was a good one, maybe it was just the path of least resistance, maybe someone told you that you were good with computers and that became the next twenty years. However you got here, you're here, and lately the work feels less like something you chose and more like something that happened to you. The salary is fine. The job is fine. You're fine. Fine is the word you use because the real word is harder to say out loud.

My name is Josh. I spent twenty years in IT consulting, and I was good at it. I understood the systems, the architectures, the migrations. But the thing I turned out to be best at was something that doesn't appear on any org chart. I was the person people talked to after the meeting was over. The conversation that starts when someone closes their laptop and says, quietly, almost surprised to hear themselves say it: I don't think I can do this anymore.

I heard that sentence hundreds of times. From junior developers and senior architects and project managers and people who had titles I couldn't keep track of. And what I noticed, every time, was that the problem was almost never technical. The problem was that nobody had asked them a very simple question.

What do you actually want?

Not what the market wants, not what the recruiter says, not what makes sense on your resume. What do you want. Most people in technology have never been asked this by someone who then sat quietly and waited for the answer. I ask it. I wait. That's what Humain is.

✦   ✦   ✦

If you work in technology and you're not happy, I'll talk to you. I won't charge you for it. That's not a marketing line—I mean it plainly. Individuals don't pay. Sometimes we'll figure out that you need a different job. Sometimes we'll figure out that you need the same job but a different relationship to it. Sometimes we'll figure out that the whole industry is wrong for you and you need to go do something else entirely. I don't arrive with an answer. I arrive with a conversation and we see where it goes.

I also work with companies, and that's what keeps the business running. The problem I help companies with is this: you are very good at hiring people, and you are not very good at noticing when those people have stopped caring. Not stopped working—stopped caring. They still show up, still hit their numbers, still perform adequately in meetings. But something has gone out of them, and the dashboard doesn't have a metric for it, and by the time you notice it's usually because they've already accepted an offer somewhere else. I help companies learn to notice earlier and respond better. It's not complicated work. It's just work that most companies don't think to do until it's too late.

✦   ✦   ✦

The technology industry is good at building things and not great at taking care of the people who build them. That's not a radical observation. Everybody in the industry knows it. The gap between what companies say about their culture and what it actually feels like to work there on a Tuesday afternoon in November is, in most cases, enormous. I'm not trying to close that gap for the whole industry. I'm trying to close it one person and one company at a time, from Wisconsin, by asking simple questions and listening to the answers.

Maybe you're the person who's been in the same role for a decade and has quietly stopped believing anything else is possible. Maybe you're the one whose resume keeps disappearing into application portals. Maybe you're someone with real ability who just can't figure out how to turn it into a career. Maybe you're senior enough that admitting you're unhappy feels ungrateful.

I've talked to all of you. You're not unusual. You're not failing. You're just in the wrong spot, or the right spot changed around you while you were busy working, and nobody helped you see it. That's what I do. I help you see it.

I'm in Wisconsin. Write me. I'll write back.