I want to share my story with you, maybe it’ll make sense to me too.
The story starts in 2019, when it was time to decide on a next step after wrapping up university. I used to think the academic world was my destiny, but like so many others I left it disillusioned. Scientific jobs are scarce and extremely competitive. Depending on your area of research, and your talent, you hardly get to choose the country in which you find a job, forget about city. If your partner also happens to be in research, this makes finding a fitting position nearly impossible. And I knew I could have a much easier time finding a job.
At the same time, something else was gnawing at me. As a child I had been so exposed to the rapid development of the internet. A culture of programmers oozing with opportunity to change the world overnight with a little bit of code. A countercultural movement, where individual programmers could take up arms against the incumbent megacorps and win. Programmers who are driven to work on their hopes and visions and try to make them real, the faster the better.
My experience in science was that of a dredge moving mud in waterways. You can watch it for hours, and it will appear to never move. Was the freedom to carve my own path worth this glacial pace? I concluded that the gears of the scientific machine spin too slowly for me.
And so I saw my luck in software engineering.
Post university, the first gig was to teach at a programming bootcamp. The formula was that customers would have their employees re-trained by us into software engineers. The market was desperate for software engineers, so this helped satisfy the customer’s demand. Since I was programming from a young age, I’ve considered coding a basic skill for basically my whole life. And although I was very excited about training experienced adults to gain the same force multiplier, at some point I didn’t have it in me anymore to point out another missing semicolon on line 5. I quit, and so my journey continued.
My PhD thesis, still warm from the printer, was on the topic of functional programming languages and type theory. I re-connected to that at a startup job where I could write in functional programming languages all day. I thought it was a blessing.
I had some amount of success in this job, including promotions, and learning about driving initiatives in software engineering. Software in the real world. I did my best to understand what the business needs were.
However, software engineering in the real world, well, it kinda sucks. The kind of programming that I was trained for, and immensely enjoyed, hinged on fully thought out, carefully executed projects, the more complex the better. Ivory tower shit. But since the 2010’s, pretty much no software is written this way anymore. Real-world software projects are immensely more productive and goal-oriented if you do them in small chunks, with little attention to detail along the way. It is surprisingly effective to build a huge house of cards, reinforcing the foundations only when it starts to collapse.
I adjusted onto this style fairly well, to the horror of my more correctness-oriented functional programming colleagues. Despite its success in reducing costs and increasing productivity, this house-of-cards approach to writing software is immensely unpopular among the software engineers themselves. If you were wondering why all apps have bugs these days, why you have to reset/restart/reinstall things all the damn time, why you can’t get support from humans anymore… This is why. And trust me, the engineers would love to do things better, but they’re really not in a position to influence this.
And don’t be mistaken: anybody claiming software engineering as a whole was better before, in the early 2000’s, is lying. Companies and governments were spending inordinate sums of money on huge software projects destined to fail with zero deliverables. Sure, you are more than right to question the quality and quantity of software today as well. But a broken, dysfunctional food delivery app that crashes twice a day can still deliver pizza most of the day.
Post-COVID, as global interest rates increased, and sales weren’t accelerating as demanded by the investors, the startup changed course, and laid off nearly all employees in Europe. And so on I went.
I pause here to murmur that I was not surprised. Startups are flexible and nimble, but also volatile and erratic. When the right opportunity arises, they’re first on top of the hill. But also the first to buckle under pressure.
Actually, I’m all here for it. Screw stability, give me a new challenge every day. Let the good times roll.
So onto the next job, writing software for a startup in the insurance space. I encountered an even bigger demand for short-term solutions. Hopefully you’re surprised to read this—I certainly was—as insurance and health are regulated industries with high stakes. Well, I saw what I saw. And although there was a lot of firefighting involved, it was also surprisingly feasible to make that small improvement every day. The lesson learned is that when such a company is small, there is also comparatively little risk exposure, and hence the software can be written to match this risk appetite. Data security and software quality is something that you prioritize more and more over time as the customer base, and your database, grows.
But uhh yeah, gonna be real now, it’s pretty unsettling to see how the whole industry deals with customer data. Don’t share your data with companies that don’t have a mission-critical need for it, folks. And thank the stars for GDPR.
Anyway, as part of the job I taught fellow engineers how to navigate the dynamics of modern software engineering, and how to implement long-term goals through short-term projects. Yes that’s right, I fully contributed to the house of cards whose existence I despise. Overall my colleagues were grateful for my lessons, I know because they said so.
Sometime in 2025, it started to bother me that I had become quite detached from my own values, and visions for the world. I had become absorbed by problems that I really didn’t want to be solving. I was spending much more time explaining to colleagues how we can already generate PDF documents from data we already have in the database, than I would’ve spent just generating the damn documents. And I thought about who the child version of myself had hoped to become. And while I was trying to figure that out, I was fired.
The timing couldn’t have been more opportune, because it gave me lots of time to reflect and think and plan out a project that would make me happy and do justice to all of my life’s lessons and experiences. So that’s what I tried to do. Lots of thinking, walking, hiking, cooking… It’s been an amazing time, and I am absolutely privileged that I can just be here in Switzerland and do nothing for a while.
And yes I am more than privileged, because I also got some of the best education in the world, I have a bunch of safety nets, I have a loving family, and I want to see all of this privilege as an obligation to do something really meaningful for the world. And I absolutely need to take some time to figure that out.
Cause like yeah I do want to do something. Bah, how can I even write it that weakly—no, I want to do something amazing and inspire others and I’ve collected a big wishlist of all my desires for my next project. And the longer the wishlist becomes, the higher my expectations rise, and the more impossible this whole endeavour becomes, and the further away from home I am.
Oh right, home, where is that now? Didn’t I grow up in one country, and then studied in a second, and then met a partner from a third country, and then we had kids in a fourth country, and now the average sentence in our household is taped together with a minimum of 3 languages?
Where am I? How did I get here?
Look, here’s the deal, I know life is complex, and nobody wakes up one day with a plan for their life. But I had expectations for myself and I feel like I’m losing control. And I thought that just giving this some time would be enough to change the course of my career. But I’m four months in, and all I have to show for it is a delusional wishlist. I don’t even have the guts to share it.
Friends and family kindly ask how I’m doing, and I judge myself for not having enough to say, except that it’s a journey and I’m not there yet, and that I have some vague ideas about what I want to do next. They don’t seem convinced, and, well, neither am I. How can I both feel so full of hope, and appear so lost at sea?
I’ll keep chipping away at the baby steps I know how to make. It’d be nice to be able to tell a story about where I’m headed. I’ll tell you when I know.