Ivan Ilyich is a software engineer
Tolstoy wrote the stages of denial in 1886, and our profession is working through them in order
Tolstoy wrote a short book about a man who did everything correctly.
Ivan Ilyich has the right career, the right marriage, the right furniture. He is a judge. He is respectable. He arranges his life the way the people around him agree a life should be arranged, and he is rewarded for it exactly as promised.
Then he falls while hanging a curtain, bruises his side, and the bruise does not heal.
What follows is not mainly about death. It is about the lie that everyone, including Ivan, maintains while something obvious is happening. The doctors discuss his kidney. His wife is annoyed by his tone. Colleagues calculate who gets his position. Nobody will say the plain thing, and the loneliness of that is worse than the pain.
I have been rereading it this year because our profession is going through the same sequence, in the same order, with the same determination not to name it.
Denial
“It cannot do real work.”
“It is autocomplete with better marketing.”
“It falls apart on anything complex.”
Each of these was true at some point, briefly, and each is repeated long after it stopped being true, because repeating it is cheaper than the alternative.
Ivan’s version is the kidney. A small, specific, manageable explanation for a thing that is neither small nor manageable. If the problem is the kidney, the structure of his life is intact.
If the problem is only boilerplate, the structure of ours is intact.
Anger
Then the anger arrives, and it goes everywhere except at the actual situation.
At managers who want to know why the estimate has not moved. At the vendors. At the colleague who shipped the feature over a weekend and will not stop mentioning it. At juniors for using the tools, and at the industry for not hiring juniors.
Ivan is furious at his wife for arranging the pillows wrong.
The anger is never really about the pillows.
Bargaining
This is the stage our profession is in now, and it is the most creative one.
It will only ever do the boring parts. The real skill is reviewing the output. Prompting is the new craft and I happen to be good at it. Architecture is safe. Systems thinking is safe. My domain is too regulated, too specialised, too strange.
Some of those will turn out to be true. I say that as someone who has been using these tools daily for a year and still thinks my judgement is doing most of the work that matters.
But listen to the shape of the sentences. They are all negotiations, and the thing being negotiated with does not take offers.
Depression
Then the quiet part.
Hiring that does not come back. Teams that get smaller without an announcement. The particular silence of a graduate who sent out two hundred applications. The feeling, late in the evening, that the specific skill you spent fifteen years sharpening is now a checkbox in somebody’s settings.
Tolstoy is very good on this. Ivan looks at his own life and the question that frightens him is not whether it is ending. It is whether it was the right life at all.
For us the question has the same shape. Not only what happens to my job, but whether the thing I organised myself around was ever the point.
The lie, which is the real subject
The part of the book that stays with me is not the dying. It is the performance around it.
Everyone pretends. Ivan pretends for them, they pretend for him, and the pretence is what makes it unbearable.
We are doing this now, with great professionalism.
Roadmaps written as though the next two years resemble the last ten. Performance reviews that measure output nobody believes in any more. Job postings that list requirements the model satisfies while you read them. Conference talks about productivity gains, delivered to rooms where half the audience is quietly worried about rent.
The honest conversations are happening in private messages. Almost nobody says it at the table.
Gerasim
The one bearable character in the book is Gerasim, the peasant who holds Ivan’s legs up at night because it eases the pain, and who says the obvious thing plainly: we are all going to die, so why not help.
No performance. No reassurance that everything is fine. Just presence, and the truth, and practical assistance.
We all have a Gerasim or two. The colleague who says, without drama, that most of their code is machine-written now, and then asks what we should do about the parts that still need us. That conversation is a relief every single time, and it is the only kind that leads anywhere.
Be that person if you can manage it. It costs very little and it is the only thing in the book that helps.
Acceptance, which is not surrender
Ivan’s ending is strange and I think frequently misread. He does not give up. In the last hours he stops defending the life he thought he had, and the terror goes with it. The pain remains and the fear does not.
Acceptance here is not “there is nothing to be done”. It is letting go of the version of yourself that was mostly a job title, and discovering there is a person underneath who can still act.
I wrote about that in another note: engineer is what the market called us. Making things is what we were doing before anyone paid for it.
And about the bubble
There is one more stage of denial, and it dresses up as sophistication.
AI is a bubble. The valuations are absurd. The spending is circular. It is all a repeat of some previous mania, and the clever position is to stand back with folded arms and wait for the correction.
Two things are being mixed up there.
Money can be in a bubble while a technology is entirely real. Railways were a catastrophic bubble and we still have railways. The late nineties were a bubble and the web ate the world anyway. If you want to argue that some valuations are insane, you will get no argument from me. Some of them obviously are.
But what people usually mean by “it’s a bubble” is “it will not change my working life”. That is not a financial claim, it is a comfort, and the evidence against it is sitting in their editor.
Which is why I think the position is backwards.
AI is not a bubble. The people who are sure it is one are the ones inside a bubble: a team that has not adopted it, a domain it has not reached yet, a seniority that insulates them from the parts it does well, a market that is still hiring the way it hired in 2021.
Bubbles feel very normal from the inside. That is their defining property.
Ivan Ilyich’s bubble was called a correct life, and it held right up until the curtain rail.