Are you OK?

I'm 44, and I've been a developer long enough to have shipped things I'm proud of and broken a fair few things I'm not. And in all that time, across all those teams and Slacks and conference bars, I can count on one hand the number of times another guy actually asked me, "Are you OK?"

Not "how's it going." Not a nod on the way past the kettle. I mean the real one. The question that leaves a little gap afterwards, big enough for an honest answer to climb into.

Don't get me wrong, the men I've worked with aren't cold. Far from it. It's just that somewhere along the way we all quietly agreed not to ask. We learned that being good at the job and struggling with life can't be in the room at the same time. That admitting you're not coping is a bug you'd rather not log against yourself.

And honestly, that's a bit sad. "I'm not doing great" should be one of the easiest things to say out loud. For a lot of us it's one of the hardest.

The particular silence of developers

We love the lone problem solver. The one who goes quiet, wrestles the bug for six hours and emerges with the fix. We treat running on no sleep like a badge of honour. Asking for help with a stack trace? Grand. Asking for help with your head? That feels like admitting the whole machine is faulty.

Now add remote work, which as an introvert genuinely suits me most of the time. But there's no office. No one to spin your chair round to. Just me, a desk and whatever's on Slack.

I wrote about this recently in The Silent Developer. That one was about what the silence costs us as engineers, the stuff you only pick up sitting near people better than you. This one is about what the same silence costs us as people. Same empty room. I'm just asking about a different missing person. Not the one who'd have caught your dodgy code. The one who'd have noticed you'd gone quiet.

Lean on your friends. Actually lean.

The thing that's actually pulled me, and people I care about, through the rough patches was never a wellness webinar or an app buried in a benefits portal. It was people.

Not just therapists, though if you need one, go, no arguments. I mean friends. The one who sees your "ugh" at 11pm and rings you instead of leaving a thumbs up.

Leaning on your mates isn't weakness. It's pretty much the whole point of having them.

So here's the bit worth sitting with for a second. Who checks on you? And who are you checking on? Because the person who looks the most sorted is usually the one who's just got really good at looking sorted.

Community is the safety net, and a diverse one is stronger

This is where a good community stops being a nice thing to have and starts really mattering.

A good one lowers the cost of putting your hand up. It's easier to say "I'm stuck", with your code or with your head, in a room that's already decided you belong there.

The Umbraco community is the best example I know. If you've been to Codegarden, dragged yourself out for the early morning CGRunners, caught up with people over coffee, or been on the end of an "H5YR" (High Five, You Rock), you'll know exactly what I mean. That friendliness isn't a slogan someone stuck on a slide. It's a proper culture, and people work at keeping it that way.

But a safety net is only as good as it is wide. Umbraco, like nearly every dev community, has been heavily male for a long time. That's improving. Slowly, but genuinely, because people actually put the effort in.

And it matters for more than just being fair, though being fair would be reason enough. When everyone in the room shares the same background and the same blind spots, they tend to share the same unwritten rules too. Including the one that says we don't talk about this stuff. Sometimes it takes someone who was never told to "man up" to give the rest of us permission to put it down. A community with more kinds of people in it simply has more people who'll notice when someone's gone quiet.

And then there's the elephant learning to code

AI can now scaffold the app, write the boilerplate and review the PR, often quicker than a junior could. Which leaves me with two questions I keep chewing on.

First. Does the junior developer survive this?

The whole way we bring people in relies on there being learnable work. The small tickets you cut your teeth on. If AI hoovers up exactly that tier, we're pulling the ladder up behind us. You don't get seniors in ten years if you stop making juniors today. In The Silent Developer I worried about the junior shipping AI code with nobody nearby to ask "hang on, why'd you do it like that?". But there's a worse version than not learning. It's not being there at all. The junior who never gets the job, because the rung they'd have started on got automated away before they reached it.

Second, and this is the one that keeps me up. Does the hard won progress on diversity start sliding back?

Have a think about who comes into tech through the side doors. Career changers. Bootcamp grads. People who weren't offered tech at school because it wasn't for "people like them". Those are disproportionately the entry level roles. Squeeze those and the numbers don't just stall, they go backwards, and that men to women ratio we've been slowly nudging in the right direction quietly widens again. A less diverse community is a less resilient one, which brings us right back to the top of this post. The networks that help us talk get thinner at exactly the moment all this upheaval makes that talk more important.

I don't have a neat answer. I wish I did. AI could just as easily free juniors up from the boring bits to do the interesting stuff sooner. Communities could build new ways in. But none of that happens on its own. It happens because people decide who's in the room is worth fighting for.

So, are you OK?

If you're a developer reading this, and especially if you're a guy who's spent 20 years being the one who figures it out, the bravest thing you can do this week isn't ship faster. It's to give an honest answer next time someone asks how you are. And then to ask someone else, and actually mean it.

Build your community wide. Keep it kind. And lean on your friends. That's what they're for.

H5YR. Now go and check on someone.

If you're struggling with your mental health, please don't wait until it's a crisis. In the UK you can call Samaritans on 116 123. In the US, call or text 988. Wherever you are, a trusted friend or your GP is a good place to start.