Re-reading Who Moved My Cheese?

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Re-reading Who Moved My Cheese?

Published on June 14, 2026

I first read Who Moved My Cheese over twenty years ago. Like many people, I finished it in an hour, filed it under “corporate motivational books,” and moved on.

This year I picked it up again.

The story is simple: two mice and two little people find a huge supply of cheese in a maze. They become comfortable. Then one day the cheese is gone. Some adapt. Some don’t.

Reading it now, the cheese felt much more specific than it did the first time.

For most of my career, the cheese was the set of skills I spent years developing as a software engineer. Knowing frameworks deeply. Remembering APIs. Writing complex code from scratch. Being fast because experience had put so much of the work in my head.

I built a career around that cheese.

The book’s central observation is almost embarrassingly simple: the problem is not losing the cheese. The problem is assuming it will still be there tomorrow.

That hit differently in 2026.

The knowing was never the hard part

One of the characters, Haw, eventually realizes the cheese is gone. But before he starts searching, he spends a long time returning to the empty station every day.

That’s the part of the book I recognize most.

The difficult thing is not understanding that change is happening. Most engineers I know understand exactly what’s happening. They’ve used AI tools. They’ve seen what they can do. They know some of the things that once made them valuable are becoming cheaper and more accessible.

The difficult thing is letting go.

It’s surprisingly easy to keep competing on the thing you’ve always been good at, even after you know the landscape has shifted. Going back to the empty station feels safer than walking into an unfamiliar maze.

The knowing was never the hard part.

The trap is comfort

The mice in the story constantly check the state of their cheese supply. They notice changes early.

The little people don’t. They assume tomorrow will look like yesterday.

That difference matters.

The engineers who seem least surprised by the current shift are not necessarily the smartest engineers. They’re often the ones who never stopped paying attention. They kept experimenting. They kept learning. They treated their skills as temporary rather than permanent.

The change still affects them, but it arrives as a slope instead of a cliff.

The book argues that disruption becomes dangerous when it catches us by surprise.

That feels less like a motivational slogan today and more like a practical observation.

Hem is not stupid

The character who refuses to move is easy to dismiss on a first reading.

On a second reading, he’s harder to ignore.

His argument is understandable:

I worked for this. I earned this. It isn’t fair that it changed.

There’s truth in all of those statements.

Many engineers spent years developing valuable skills. The depth is real. The effort was real.

But the maze doesn’t care what feels fair.

The cheese didn’t disappear. It moved.

The uncomfortable question is whether we’re spending our energy defending the old station or exploring the maze.

The cheese moved

The book never tells readers where the new cheese is.

That’s probably why it has lasted.

Its message isn’t that change is good. It’s that change happens whether we approve of it or not.

Reading it as a software engineer during the AI shift, I found myself less interested in the cheese and more interested in the maze.

The old pile may be smaller than it was. Some of it may be gone entirely.

But the maze is still there.

And whatever comes next will be found there, not in the empty station.

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