Stop Optimizing for Your Best Days

From the Systems Check episode: Nischal Rana - Stop Optimizing for Your Best Days

By Naina

If you work in tech, you've probably felt it — that low-grade hum of pressure that never quite turns off. The standups, the sprints, the tickets, the on-call rotations. The expectation that you'll just absorb whatever the system demands because that's simply how it works.

In our podcast Systems Check, I sat down with Nischal Rana, an integrations engineer for the State of Connecticut's Department of Public Health. Nischal builds and maintains the data infrastructure that routes healthcare reporting — lab results, newborn screenings, disease surveillance — from hospitals and clinics up to state and federal agencies. He also happens to be my brother, which means I've had a front-row seat to his thinking for years.

What we ended up talking about was something I think a lot of people in DevOps and IT have never been given language for: the default level of inertia baked into tech culture, and what it actually costs over time.

What an Integrations Engineer at the State Level Actually Does

Before we got into burnout, I asked Nischal to ground listeners in his world — because "integrations engineer" is one of those titles that sounds technical and abstract until you understand what it actually touches.

Every time someone gets a blood panel, a lead screening, or a COVID test, that data has to go somewhere. Nischal's job is making sure it gets there — standardized, secured, HIPAA-compliant, and routed to the right agencies on deadline. During COVID, that meant processing upward of 500,000 lab results a day through systems that were simultaneously being scaled and updated in real time.

"So much of what we see as dysfunction in government," he told me, "comes from the fact that people there have such depth of experience — and breadth. Government jobs are generally more stable, so you're empowered to address problems more creatively."

That reframe stuck with me. We're conditioned to think of government tech as slow and bloated. What Nischal described was something more nuanced: a system dealing with enormous technical debt, yes — but staffed by people with deep institutional knowledge and genuine stakes in public health outcomes.

The Default Level of Inertia in DevOps Culture

Nischal started his career in QA at a Fortune 100 company, spent years as a solutions engineer, and then moved into full-stack development. Across all of it, he kept noticing the same pattern.

"DevOps prioritizes these verb-oriented words," he said. "It's agile. It's scrum. It's a sprint. Even when things go as planned, you're always on call, always looking at blast impact, always in motion."

The problem isn't the pace itself — it's that the pace gets normalized so early that you stop questioning it. You're a junior dev staying up through a bug hunt, running on caffeine and adrenaline, and it doesn't feel like a warning sign. It feels like belonging.

"You see yourself doing it, you see other developers doing it," he said. "It almost becomes a point of pride — who can outlast who."

That normalization is exactly how burnout hides. It doesn't announce itself. It accumulates.

How to Tell the Difference Between a Hard Season and a Broken System

One of the most practical questions in burnout recovery is this one: Is this situation difficult, or is it dysfunctional? The answer matters because the interventions are completely different.

Nischal's answer had to do with empowerment — specifically, whether the organization empowers its developers to raise concerns, think creatively, and build relationships across teams, or whether it just processes them like ticket machines.

"The most successful companies empower their developers not just to do what's on the ticket, but to question it. To say — I can go down this defined path, or if I'm given a little more time, I can do that plus something extra."

A broken system, by contrast, rewards speed of output over quality of thought. Developers compete for ticket closures instead of collaborating toward better solutions. New hires get paired with burned-out seniors who pass along cynicism before they pass along anything else. The dysfunction reproduces itself.

"Stop Optimizing for Your Best Days — Build for Your Average or Hard Days"

This was the moment in our conversation that I keep coming back to, and I think it's going to land differently depending on where you are in your career.

Nischal wasn't just talking about code. He was talking about how we design our own capacity.

"You can sit down, drink your monster, wear your noise-canceling headphones, and code for 10 hours straight. And you'll have semi-good results. But that is not a recipe for long-term sustained growth."

The optimization culture in tech — and honestly, in wellness culture too — pushes us to perform at our ceiling. But your ceiling isn't your sustainable output. Your floor is. The question isn't what can I do on my best day? It's what can I do consistently, without destroying myself?

For Nischal, that shifted how he thought about everything from scheduling to relationship-building. "Developing personal relationships has gone farther for me than developing highly specific technical skills," he said. "I have enough social capital with my team to say, 'I think something's off here — can we pause?' and people listen."

That's not softness. That's infrastructure.

AI in Government Tech: Relief, Threat, or Something More Complicated?

We couldn't have this conversation without talking about AI — and Nischal's perspective here is worth sitting with, especially for anyone managing a tech team right now.

"If you use AI to build you the exact solution you need without understanding why it works, you lose that deeper level of understanding. And that's going to come back to you."

His larger concern is structural: companies that eliminate junior developers in favor of AI agents lose the pipeline that builds institutional knowledge. Ten years from now, you have one developer and forty AI agents — and you're entirely dependent on whatever subscription model you've locked yourself into.

"Humans are always going to give you creative inputs," he said. "Creative solutions to problems that AI agents, at least for now, I just don't see that."

What the Career Transition Taught Him About Burnout

After sixteen years in the private sector, Nischal made the shift to state government — partly prompted by seeing the early versions of ChatGPT and sensing the writing on the wall, and partly because he was, in his words, a little burned out.

What the transition gave him wasn't just a different pace. It gave him purpose that was legible.

"In my first role, I'd spend all day moving money from one bank to another and at the end of the day think — what did I actually achieve? Now I can say: the data we reported this week helped secure public health funding. It has a direct impact on quality of life."

He referenced the Japanese concept of ikigai — the idea of a reason to be, a convergence of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be sustained by. That framework doesn't require a dramatic career pivot. But it does require honesty about whether your current work is feeding you or just consuming you.

What He Does Daily to Not Burn Out

I asked Nischal what he actually does, day to day, to maintain equilibrium. No platitudes — just practice.

He takes short breaks throughout the workday. Goes into the office once a week to break the home-office loop. But the thing that's stuck most consistently is a midday journaling practice — pen and paper, not a productivity app.

"I don't write something catchy. I just write what's on my mind. How I'm feeling, what I'm concerned about, and one thing I want to do tomorrow. Three bullet points. That's it."

Six months in, he can flip back and trace his mental state across weeks from a single sentence. It's not about recall — it's about creating a break from his work identity, a few minutes of being a full person instead of a developer with a ticket queue.

Simple. Consistent. Sustainable. Which is, come to think of it, exactly what this whole conversation was about.

For Leaders and Managers Listening

Nischal closed with something I want to echo directly to anyone managing tech teams right now: don't let go of your creative developers in favor of AI efficiency. Junior developers are not redundant — they are the future institutional knowledge of your organization. And burnout isn't a personal failing of your high performers. It's often a structural signal that your system is optimized for the wrong thing.

If people are burning out, it's worth asking: are we building for our best days, or for the real ones?

Listen to the full episode

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Systems Check: The Human Operating System for Ambition & Burnout with Naina — "Stop Optimizing for Your Best Days" with Nischal Rana. Available wherever you get your podcasts.