--- type: "newsletter_archive" title: "Disruptive Empathy" handle: "www" owner: "Eric Near (@ericnear1980)" canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/www/archive" markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/www/archive.md" archive_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/www/archive" chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/www/chat" articles_total: 29 articles_listed: 20 page: 1 page_size: 20 --- # Disruptive Empathy ## Articles (page 1) Showing 20 of 29 published articles. Next page: https://usecommune.com/n/www/archive.md?page=2 - 2026-08-06 - [The Feedback They Almost Didn't Give You](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/the-feedback-they-almost-didn-t-give-you) - There is a habit I picked up somewhere in the middle of my career, small enough that I almost don’t think of it as a habit. At the end of any feedback conversation, once my supervisor has said what th - 2026-08-04 - [Most Advice is a Memoir, Part II](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/most-advice-is-a-memoir-part-ii) - Last time I wrote that advice is autobiographical: a story about someone else’s context, offered to you as if it were a set of instructions for yours. What I didn’t get into, because it deserved its o - 2026-08-01 - [More writing this week...](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/more-writing-this-week) - Saturday preview (took a tiny break this week, the good kind, not the ominous kind). Two posts landing soon. The first is part two of “Most Advice Is a Memoir” (this one’s about job searching, and the - 2026-07-21 - [Most Advice Is a Memoir](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/most-advice-is-a-memoir) - The most useful thing I learned about advice I learned too late, and the way I learned it was expensive. So here it is for free. Advice is autobiographical. Every piece of it. The person giving it to - 2026-07-16 - [Your Strengths Outlast the Mission Statement](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/your-strengths-outlast-the-mission-statement) - I used to post like I was in a hostage video. Not literally. (The lighting was fine.) But if you went back through my LinkedIn content from my startup years, you would find a person who was enthusiast - 2026-07-14 - [The Block Button Is Not a Career Decision](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/the-block-button-is-not-a-career-decision) - I want to talk about the six weeks I didn’t block someone, because I think that interval is more instructive than the block itself. The situation was not complicated. Someone had been leaving comments - 2026-07-09 - [The Perfect Solution That Never Ships](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/the-perfect-solution-that-never-ships) - The best argument against doing the imperfect thing in front of you is that it isn’t perfect. I have watched entire organizations lose years to this argument, and I want to talk about what that actual - 2026-07-07 - [Stepping-Aside-As-A-Service](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/stepping-aside-as-a-service) - A few weeks ago I was at a business networking event, doing the thing you do after the formal part ends, which is stand near the coffee and make small talk with strangers while deciding whether your s - 2026-07-02 - [The Kindest Leader in the Room Can Still Build a Cult](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/the-kindest-leader-in-the-room-can-still-build-a-cult) - I want to be careful here, because the person I’m describing does not exist as a villain in this story. That is exactly what makes this worth writing about. Picture a leader who is, by any reasonable - 2026-05-30 - [Disruptive Empathy](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/disruptive-empathy) - For the past few years, I've been writing about the things that shaped how I think about work (and people, and technology, and the strange overlap between all three). Those posts are turning into a bo - 2026-05-26 - [What We Gave Up When We Got Infinite Scale](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/what-we-gave-up-when-we-got-infinite-scale) - I remember the hum of the server room in the early 2000s. It was a physical, vibrating thing (a literal heartbeat for the company) that required us to care for it with a level of intimacy that seems a - 2026-05-21 - [The Wiring Beneath: Autistic In The Room](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/the-wiring-beneath-autistic-in-the-room) - I remember the first time I realized that my Cisco switches and I shared a common language. They required a specific sequence of commands, a precise syntax, and they didn’t care about my tone of voice - 2026-05-19 - [Why We Starve the Human Firewall](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/why-we-starve-the-human-firewall) - I was sitting at my desk recently, looking at a stack of compliance reports, and I felt that familiar, buzzing hum in my brain that comes when I’ve been staring at a problem for twenty years. It is a - 2026-05-14 - [The Wiring Beneath: The ADHD Tax](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/the-wiring-beneath-the-adhd-tax) - I used to think that my brain was just a series of poorly labeled patch panels. In the early days of my career (back when we were still crimping our own Cat5 cables), I assumed that if I just found th - 2026-05-12 - [Need-to-Know Basis: On Hiring Capable Women and Then Making Them Beg for Context](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/need-to-know-basis-on-hiring-capable-women-and-then-making-t) - There is a particular kind of hire that happens regularly in tech companies, usually when something has gone sideways. A team is failing to execute. A product is stalling. A function needs to be stood - 2026-05-08 - [Context Not Included](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/context-not-included) - If you’re of a certain vintage (the vintage that spent considerable time staring at CRT monitors, that is), you probably remember that specific, jarring sound of a computer connecting to the internet - 2026-05-05 - [Read-Only Mode: On Working Alongside People Who Are Rebuilding Their Own Authority](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/read-only-mode-on-working-alongside-people-who-are-rebuildin) - There is a particular way some people hold their breath before they speak in meetings. Not the ordinary pause of someone collecting their thoughts. Something else. A scan. They are reading the room fo - 2026-04-29 - [Why You’re Depressed After 5 Minutes on LinkedIn](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/why-you-re-depressed-after-5-minutes-on-linkedin) - There’s a specific kind of low-grade misery that settles in around the third or fourth scroll. You weren’t even feeling bad before you opened the app. You were fine. Maybe a little bored. But then you - 2026-04-28 - [Engineering Empathy in Post-Growth Startups](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/engineering-empathy-in-post-growth-startups) - The first time I watched a senior engineer give their notice, I was sitting in an open-plan office surrounded by monitors. Half of them were displaying dashboards: service uptime, error rates, p99 lat - 2026-04-21 - [Efficiency Vs. Busyness Theater](https://usecommune.com/n/www/a/efficiency-vs-busyness-theater) - At some point in my mid-twenties I developed a very specific habit: whenever I felt uncertain about whether I was doing enough work, I would open my email client. Not to read anything in particular. N