Halftank Fuel from Mary Carns

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio You saw them. Every single one. The interviewer kept checking their phone. The vague answer about why the last person left this role. The way everyone on the team looked exhausted in that final round. You saw it all and took the job anyway. This isn't about them. This is about you. After nine layoffs, I've gotten uncomfortably good at spotting dysfunction during interviews. I can read the room like a survival skill now: the tiny hesitations, the...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio I had layoff brain for a very VERY long time. Think of your brain after a layoff like a phone that's been dropped one too many times. It still works, technically. You can make calls and end texts. But the battery drains faster than it should, the screen sometimes freezes for no reason, and certain apps just refuse to open anymore. You've learned to work around these glitches so automatically that you've forgotten they're not normal operating...

I’ve spent fifteen years paying a bill I never agreed to. It’s the cost of being fluent in two languages that should speak to each other but refuse to learn. On one side: creative thinking. The ability to see what doesn’t exist yet, to hold ambiguity long enough for patterns to emerge, to know that the best solutions rarely arrive in the first meeting. On the other: business logic. The need for certainty, measurable outcomes, clear timelines, and decisions made yesterday. Both are legitimate...

I’ve been fired nine times in fifteen years. Not for being bad at my job, but for being good at the wrong things. I was good at seeing problems other people wanted to ignore. Good at asking questions that made people uncomfortable. Good at holding space for ambiguity when everyone else wanted certainty by Tuesday. Good at treating design like it mattered instead of like decoration you apply after the real decisions get made. Turns out, those are excellent ways to become what companies call a...

I was in a meeting at a large financial company when I casually mentioned "testing the design with users." Before I could finish my sentence, the lead architect snapped: "No one cares about what it looks like." The room went silent. Some of my teammates jumped to my defense with a quick "not cool, man", but I stayed curious instead of defensive. I kept the conversation going because I was genuinely confused about why this suggestion had triggered such hostility. It took weeks of working...

I've watched it happen more times than I can count. A CEO or executive becomes obsessed with choosing paint colors and fabric swatches for the new office redesign, micromanaging decisions that should be left to the interior designer they just hired. It's like watching someone plan a wedding where every napkin fold becomes a referendum on their vision and taste. Except this isn't a wedding. It's a software company. I call this the CEOzilla pattern, and it's one of the most reliable red flags...

Picture this: You’re on a Zoom call during the pandemic. Your team just survived a massive layoff at a financial company. Nobody knows where design requests will come from anymore. The executive who’s supposed to lead your newly reorganized team keeps taking calls from his realtor, because he’s shopping for a beach house. Most of your team can’t afford to buy a first home. You’re all terrified about losing health insurance in the middle of a pandemic and you’ve seen a lot of colleagues just...