The Debugging of Geeta Sharma
She landed Google for $672,000. But before she said yes to the offer, she had to say one sentence she’d never spoken.
The first time I met Geeta Sharma, she was five minutes early and looked like she hadn’t slept in three days. “Taha, hi,” she said, pushing her hair behind one ear, eyes flicking to her second screen. “Thanks for making time. I won’t take long.”
Senior Engineering Manager. Twenty years at the same company. CS grad. Data, storage, cloud. But it was the way she sat that caught my attention.
Her camera framed a neat room, with a lavender yoga ball serving as a chair, and a woman who kept repositioning herself to rub her lower back unconsciously. She tried to hide it.
She was there for a new role, but underneath, nothing was moving. Her system was screaming. She’d landed four interviews. Failed two. The other two, she ghosted.
In the first month, there was a moment—small, too small for most people to catch—when she rescheduled due to a medical appointment. “MRI,” she said. “Nothing serious… nothing serious. Just something in my back. Right side.” She dismissed it like deja vu. In reality, she was trapped.
This is the person I started working with in April. She landed a Google L6 Manager role in October. Which was odd. Because by July, Geeta was no longer a manager.
To understand how she went from that state of collapse to a Google offer, you have to stop looking at her “motivation.” It wasn’t a failure of willpower. It was a systems error.
The Bug
In engineering, the hardest bugs aren’t in the logic; they’re in the state.
A race condition, a memory leak, a corrupted flag: the code looks right, but the system behaves erratically because its internal state is wrong. You can’t execute a “write” command from a “read-only” state. You can’t service a new request when you’re stuck in a garbage-collection loop.
The human operating system is no different.
We call it “procrastination” or “laziness,” but that’s the wrong error message. It’s the high-level, generic exception on your dashboard, like ERR_MOTIVATION_FAILURE, that tells you what failed, but not why.
The real issue is a low-level state error.
You’re trying to run the practice_interview() command from STATE_ABORT. It will never execute.
I did the same. I solved massive problems at Microsoft, Yahoo, Walmart, leading teams of 250+. Most of it came from spinning inside that cycle. I burned out: double bypass heart surgery at 41. So, I made it my mission.
In 2022, I began coaching high-performers: engineers, managers, and tech leads with bulletproof resumes and brittle nervous systems, the ones who take cold showers at 5 am and still feel like frauds by noon.
Over 200 of them have walked through this cycle with me. Some now work at Google, Microsoft, Meta. Some just sleep better.
This post serves as a debugger to help you find the bug.
Debugging Geeta’s State
Geeta’s system was a perfect example of this. She thought her problem was Focus. She believed if she just focused harder, her Behavior would become consistent.
She was half-right. Her behavior was consistent: consistently avoiding.
She was trying to debug without the schematic. She thought her operating model was a simple, two-step process:
Focus → Behavior
The real model, the architecture of the human operating system she was actually running, is a three-step process:
Focus → Internal State → Behavior (FISB)
This was the schematic she was missing.
Her Focus (F): Her conscious, logical goal. “I will practice DSA.”
Her Behavior (B): The actual, observable output. “Avoidance. Ghosting.”
Her Internal State (IS): This was the black box. The missing link. This is the body’s immediate, unfiltered response. This is the state that was corrupted.
Geeta kept trying to fix her “Focus” by writing more GDocs, all while her “Internal State” was locked in STATE_THREAT and screaming ABORT!
This was the bug in her FISB.
To find it, we start tactically. We tore down her LinkedIn and her resume. The inbox woke up. Netflix. Highspot. Apple. CrowdStrike.
We mock-prepped nonstop. I started to notice she’d delay one, cancel another. Say she was fine, then text at 2 a.m. about whether to use the word “drive” or “lead” in her answer. It wasn’t indecision. It was exhaustion she didn’t know how to catch.
Then, Google reached out. Engineering Manager. L6. The kind of role people spend careers chasing. She said she felt... nothing. Not relief. Not joy. Just a flatline hum of obligation.
That’s when the body stopped whispering and started screaming.
She broke out in hives.
Slept in fits. Woke up at 2:30 a.m. to do classical music riyaaz, then fell asleep again mid-afternoon.
Her body was stuck in a cycle of alert-collapse-alert.
The following week, she came to the session and began with a sentence that should have sounded ordinary. But it didn’t.
“I’m an IC now.”
No drama in her voice.
“My boss told me I am not technical enough,” she said. “So I started taking more design tasks. This started a month before we met.” She paused. “Now they say it is better if I focus on IC work… Besides, I will not have to deal with my boss that much.”
That line sat between us. It sounded like relief. It reeked of avoidance.
The crash and the confession opened a door. The following week, she came to the session with a different thought. The one I was waiting for.
“Taha, there’s something I should probably talk about,” she said. “But I don’t know if it’s relevant.”
“If you’re thinking about it,” I said, “it’s relevant.”
She got quiet, calculating. The bug was in the way.
I gave her a nudge. “I had a boss at Microsoft who took away my teams, put me on a PIP.”
I expected her to answer with her boss.
She didn’t.
