I’d love to be able to reinvent myself in a structured way. But structure requires knowing your expectations, and I don’t have them yet. All I know for sure is that a reinvention is needed. So as you can imagine, I’m spending most days sitting on a comfy chair waiting for the reinvention to happen.
You’d be surprised how much personal growth you can get from touching grass for an extended period. It’s a real luxury that most people are only exposed to around major life events. Fortunately, this is not my proverbial “interesting times”. Yes, I’m absolutely aware of my privilege, and this privilege is absolutely an obligation to do something special. It’d be such a waste to hop into the next job hoping that things somehow improve around me.
I’m creating a picture of what would not be a waste. The central device of my search is a document that I’ve dubbed my delusional wishlist. I hesitated to share this in the last post, because it’s a document that requires heavy annotation. Even I don’t understand its meaning, especially of the more recent entries. It’s a search driven by pure intuition. While I still can’t tell you what the process really is, at least I can tell you what it does for me, and resolve the unintended cliffhanger of the last post.
Leaving software
Software in the real world kinda sucks. The cause for that lies somewhere between the way we write software changing, and the mission becoming a lot less about hopeful optimism. As James Randall wrote:
Computers stopped being fascinating, cantankerous machines that demanded respect and understanding, and became appliances. The craft became invisible.
But it wasn’t just the craft that changed. The promise changed.
In addition to the role of software in society changing course, technological innovation at large is grinding to a halt. Disruptive science is a dying form of art.
The day I’m ready to start planning, I start a text document with an attempt at identifying industries and niches that I care about. I title the document “wishlist”, write down 10-20 industries, and feel… pretty empty. Sure, nobody is born with a love for enterprise software or finance or manufacturing processes, it’s just something you roll into for one reason or another, and find joy along the way. But this was not a lack of excitement, this was just a lack of feeling anything at all.
This is nonsense. How can I name a significant percentage of the global economy and conclude I have nothing to do. But it’s also not right, because I often chat with people individually about more specific topics within these huge industries. And in those conversations I’m excited and sharing and wishing I had the opportunity to dive in head first. Well, now I have that opportunity, where’s the plunge?
After a few days of thought, I change course—perhaps I need more specific, concrete ideas to get excited. The thought doesn’t strike a chord, but surely the top-down, general approach hasn’t brought me anything either.
I try spelling out some underdeveloped ideas for technical projects to undertake. Well, at least the version on paper is underdeveloped, I’m sure my head has a lot more to say, but getting that translation right is exactly what makes writing difficult.
The first, more specific idea is about re-inventing an aspect of database technology. It results from frustration at my last job, where we spent a lot of time thinking about database schemas, and got very much lost having to define these schemas upfront, even though we already had a bunch of customer data that we really ought to save before it’s lost, and the database schemas prevent this. And modifying those database schemas was far too complex of an operation to allow broadly saving all the data we ought to. So in short, the underlying thought here is something like, let’s try to create a general solution to the very real problem I encountered previously at a real job where they made real adult money.
I write enough detail in my wishlist that I can at least recall the package of thoughts in my head. It looks like a valid idea, but something is missing, aside from all the things needed to make it a real project like people and funding and all of that. Spelling out this software business idea just isn’t it. I rhetorically wonder whether the point of my search is to find one more piece of software to create and throw onto the SaaS pile.
Some weeks down the line, I’m reading a self-help book about career development. There’s a chapter about leaving a role “on time”, and it warns that a job can become too easy to the point of boredom. I copy over a oneliner to my wishlist, not knowing what to do with it yet.
Except for concluding that it would be so nice if I could do meaningful work outside of software.
And in the darkness bind them
The wish confronts me with my weakness. Writing software is my Excalibur, my Thor’s hammer, my One Ring. If you grow up believing that engineering drives society forwards, and that software is the most scalable new solution out there, it’s difficult to let your free flow of thoughts roam elsewhere. I recall a hot take from software consultancy: there are no software problems, only people problems.
Okay, let’s add some ways to solve people problems to my list. “Start a software engineering detox community”: if I struggle to solve problems other than through software, who else might wish to change their ways? “Write a book about developing simple software”: OK I guess I have some ideas about radical simplification of our collective approach to writing software, but I’m not sure it’s coherent enough, and do I really want to commit to writing a book with questionable payoff?
And like, great, but this is all still software. I let out a big sigh.
As a distraction, I watch a YouTube science video. I jot down the cheap thought—become a science communicator on YouTube. While I immediately dismiss the idea again, I also notice that something about it sticks in a way that previous ideas didn’t. I carry a lot of knowledge, understanding and know-how with me, and I love sharing this with individuals. It’s only after I wrote down an item in my wishlist that I notice that I’m absolutely terrible at actually fucking doing so.
I’m not all that bad at speaking, presenting, teaching… If I want to reach a bigger audience, I need to build a habit of sharing and speaking out about things I care about. Not because, or not necessarily because, it’s the immediate thing I want to start doing as a career, but because it’s part of who I want to be.
Just to drive the point home here: it's only thanks to the wishlist that I spot a pattern in my own behavior that I want to break. The YouTube video could've been a mere distraction, the specific (if not very fruitful) search outside of software merely a daydream.
For the first time in my life, I make a new year’s resolution: create something and display it, as in to the world. The rules are that it has to be my own initiative, and that I display the result to the broadest possible audience. In fact, the previous post was how I reached my own target for January. It felt like a stupid small goal, but I really didn't want to fail at the first step of building this habit. My goal for February? Create two things, any kind, and fucking tell people about it.
Okay, that’s progress of some kind. Still, writing a handful of blog posts isn’t going to get me anywhere. “Become a blogger” is not on my wishlist.
During the weeks that follow, it begins to dawn on me that writing “do some science communication somehow somewhere”, “somehow help bring about the collapse of the AI bubble”, and “write a biography of my great-grandmother-in-law” doesn’t add up to a career path I can execute on. They’re just delusions.
But I can’t resist adding more. I’m not satisfied while it’s just a list of ideas that don’t quite convince even myself. As I tell my toddlers, it doesn’t help to say what you don’t want. But saying what you do want is more difficult and therefore comes later.
And one day, I manage to write down the biggest delusion of them all.
The conductor
When I was still classified as a child, our parents had a policy that we should have one sportsy hobby, and one artsy hobby. I never thought of it much, but in retrospect it adds up to me being a more sportsy and artsy person than most people around me ended up being. Thanks, mom and dad.
Having moved around Europe a fair bit, it’s been difficult to do much with the music training I got. In a way, my academic ambitions stood in the way of my musical ones. In the last two years, at least I sang in a neighborhood choir.
We had a particular song in mind to sing with the choir, but there was no appropriate sheet music we could use. It would’ve been totally okay to accept this fact and move on, everybody in the choir has busy lives. But it’s an itch I needed to scratch, and so one day, I decide to sit down and do the thing I was sure I could do: just write the sheet music myself. I know enough music theory, how tough could it be?
So I did. And it was everything I wanted it to be. And then I showed the choir and they were excited, and the conductor, a high school music teacher, asked if I wanted to teach the piece, which is something I've never done.
Secretly, I’d been hoping he’d ask, and I had even prepared for it, but all the while I thought I was fooling myself. But now that it was real, I didn’t hesitate. So I did my best to teach the choir the piece of music I’d arranged for them. And it was awesome. I was still shaking with excitement when I got back home.
Oh right. Music, my other childhood dream. One of those dreams you hide even from yourself. And so many thoughts and memories fly through my head. But one thing is clear: conducting/composing belongs on the wishlist.
And very quickly I realize that this delusion is not at all about the what, and hardly about the how.
“The conductor” is the visualization of a good feeling I want to have, of a role I want to play. It’s not about the profession, it’s about the satisfaction of finding a way to combine your unique strengths into something that people enjoy. For me, that’s to be in a position where I can teach and explain, get people to cooperate in a way that has a deliberate ring to it.
I think about the new year’s resolution that brought me to this point. Since the new year I’ve enjoyed the choir in a new way, with new guts to stand out above the crowd. The resolution is allowing me to shed a certain follower mindset that has bothered me at work for years.
I cried several times during the last months remembering the opportunities I missed to speak up and make the things I wanted to stand for real. To create what needs to be created. I’m pissed at myself for keeping thoughts to myself, locked up in a castle of ostensible success.
Outro
Reality hits. A friend calls and helpfully asks how I’m doing with my search. I struggle to find the words that show how meaningful it is to me that I can just, you know, take some time for this. See, so many people are supportive of me in this period, but all the support in the world can’t drown out that little voice expressing doubt about what I’m doing.
Am I less lost? I don’t think I look like it. I’m collecting fragments of my expectations about work. The fragments depicting the how are slowly taking shape. I don’t have many fragments yet about the what, but I’m weirdly unconcerned about that. And as I quipped to a friend recently, the fragments are getting bigger, so that one day the puzzle will come together.
And for once, I dare to trust my instincts, and I’m not ready to let go of that.