This is post six of ten on a careers list, and it is the one where I have nothing.
I have never worked in climate tech. I have never built anything for an energy, carbon, grid or materials company. I do not know anyone doing it well enough to report on, and I have no data of my own about the sector.
I could write this post anyway. It would not be hard: read a few reports, find some funding numbers, describe the categories, close with something about the next decade being decisive. It would take an afternoon and it would read exactly like the other thousand versions of it, because it would be assembled from the same sources.
I am not going to, and the reason is the point of this whole series.
What a post like that actually costs
Every one of these posts is meant to be worth reading because something in it came from having done the thing. When I write about automations failing silently I am describing three of my own that did. When I write about invented statistics I am describing my own website telling a stranger I had delivered a hundred and fifty projects I had not.
If I write a competent, sourced, entirely secondhand piece about climate tech, nothing visible changes. It looks like the others. It might even perform better — it is a popular topic.
But it would mean the byline no longer tells you anything. A reader would have no way to know which posts came from experience and which came from an afternoon of reading, because I would have made them look identical. That is not a small trade. It is the only asset this blog has.
The general version
The tools are extremely good at producing confident, well-structured writing about subjects the author does not know. That capability arrived quickly and it is genuinely useful when you are drafting something you do know and cannot get started on.
Pointed at a topic you do not know, it does something different: it removes the friction that used to stop you. Writing badly about an unfamiliar subject used to be visibly hard, and the difficulty was doing useful work — it was a signal, felt by the writer, that they were out of their depth. That signal is gone. What is left is an artefact that reads as authoritative to everyone including its author.
So the discipline has to move somewhere else. It has to become a rule you apply before you start, because you will not feel resistance while you are working.
Mine is: do I have a receipt? Something I built, broke, measured or paid for. If not, I either go and get one or I say I do not have one.
What I would need before writing this properly
An actual engagement. Six months inside a business in that sector, with access to what it really costs them to operate, where the software is, and what breaks. Then the post would be worth your time.
Until then, this is the honest version, and it is shorter.
Where I come into this
Still nothing to sell. If you want something useful from this page anyway, the website check is free, needs no account, and is not a lead form — it just tells you what your site does on a phone.
Nothing to sell on this one. If you do work in climate tech and think the operational picture is different from what I would guess, I would genuinely like to hear it — that is how the receipt gets acquired.
Post 6 of 10. Normal service resumes with the next one, which is about numbers being true.
