Today is my first day as unemployed. I got laid off, but I’m happy! I know, it feels weird to be happy after being fired during the tech-job crisis, but I truly am. Now, it’s time to move on. But, before doing so, I believe it is worth spending a couple of minutes to reflect on what I did in the past, and what I want to do in the future.
I started my professional career working in a small construction business. I was lost after high school, but fortunately, my father had a small local business where I had the chance to start working as soon as I finished the studies. Despite never reading a book during school (cough…cough, yes, I never did my summer exercises), in that period I started doing it, and I started getting interested in math and physics. I had a very bad experience with them in high school, maybe because I studied sociology, and well, who cares about these subjects right? I was wrong, damn wrong. They are the language of nature, and probably one of the most wonderful things to lose yourself in. Since then, I decided that I had to become a professor. This was probably the first and most important decision of my life. Too shy to switch directly from sociology and carpentry to math, I convinced myself it was better to take it easier, and try aerospace engineering. Yes, that was my reasoning at the time. That’s how I ended up enrolling in a PhD, it was the natural path to become a full-time professor. But I quit, I didn’t finish it. I had to take that decision with a bitter taste in my mouth, but it just felt wrong to me. The academic life was not what I expected, I decided to take the path of teaching, not to publish papers and get citations. Life is not as expected many times, and you have to cope with this fact.
At that time I was hooked on machine learning and blockchain stuff, and I was hungry to learn more and more about computers and how to properly use them to build software to solve people’s problems. That’s how I started my journey as a software engineer. This was the second time in my life in which I took a bet on myself and decided to reinvent my career in a completely different field. I loved this journey, it helped me in exposing myself to many different situations that I do believe would not have been possible in academia. I started working in start-ups where each person has to wear many hats and to experiment with many different roles, I gave presentations at conferences, I managed a small team as a team lead, and a bigger one as a manager. I moved to Berlin with my girlfriend and my dog, and travelled to Colombia, UAE, and many other places around the world. I had the chance to work on complex systems, perform security analysis and manage ongoing vulnerability exploits that were draining people’s money. I learned, and I learned a lot from both the dynamic environment and all the smart people I had around. It has been a challenging and exciting journey, but now I have to move on.
I said I’m happy to have been laid off, and I’m sorry for the people that are struggling with this situation, but I do believe that this is my chance to take the third important turn in my life. In the past I favored exploration instead of exploitation1 because there were too many interesting things to explore and discover, and I was getting bored easily. Despite that, there were always constants in all the actions I was taking, I was always looking for new challenges where I had the chance to help people live a better life. I spent the last 5 years working as a software engineer in the blockchain industry. I was genuinely convinced it was the best way for me to make a difference helping people in one of the most critical aspects of life, the financial one. This conviction started fading away in the past year or so, but I never had enough strength to change. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that developing financial instruments on top of a public and distributed ledger is completely wrong, but the direction the industry is taking is orthogonal to mine, and don’t want to be part of it anymore. Besides the pure financial application, I strongly believe that people working on the privacy-focused aspect of cryptographic primitives will really do huge things for people. I considered focusing on SNARK instead of starting again from scratch in a new industry, but I need a hard cut here. I need to find something I’m really excited about, and to do so, I need fresh air. I was in a sweet spot during the past years with the remote work, full autonomy, no strict working hours, and a salary that I would never have imagined receiving in my life. It was not easy changing and moving away from that equilibrium, I needed an external force to do it. This is why I’m truly happy about getting laid off, this was the push I was waiting and looking for to put myself again in the game to do what I think has real value.
One of the most important lessons for me has been understanding that a decision does not have to be evaluated by the result, but by everything that has been done before it. What was truly in our power is the aspect that deserves attention. If we feel that something is wrong, or is no longer aligned with our ideals, just change. Take some time to reflect, and start again. A friend of mine recommended me the book “Thinking in Bets” to me, which I didn’t really like, but this concept was at the heart of the book, and I fully agree with the point.
I do believe that now is the time to leverage the experience coming from the exploration phase, and decide where to specialize, to enter in the exploitation phase and understand what I really want to master for the next few years. To do so, it is important to reflect on the constants I had in the past, or that I felt were missing. I enjoy working on complex analytical problems, focusing on users instead of abstractions, and interacting with nature. I’m not sure where I will go, but I’m very excited about the journey in front of me, and I look forward to sharing what I find along the way.
P.S.: I will probably try to leverage the experience I gained in applied math and software design to work on satellite imagery analysis for Earth observation. In this moment, this feels like the right path. Happy to chat if you have something to share about this sector!
Footnotes
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The Particle swarm optimizer is an optimization heuristic based on bird swarm search for food which is based on the exploration/exploitation trade-off. ↩