I think I finally came to terms with my mediocrity as a software guy.

In early 2025 I quit working for a big multi-national company to be the sole full-time developer at a small small company that I helped start with a former colleague. I have been working for large software companies since 2018 and I realised that these places are not really aligned with my goals.

Here are a few thoughts about all this.

Early in my career when I was interviewing for software positions I often got to see the insides of serious software companies. Huge, fancy open offices, kickass developer stations with huge screens, very smart looking people everywhere. I wanted to be a part of that so bad. I always wanted to prove that I am good. Intelligent, skilled, thorough, to prove that I also belong to a fancy open office like that with a kickass workstation and free snacks at the kitchen.

Then eventually I got to work for such companies. It was always intriguing at frist but then slowly as I started to understand their processes and saw the piles of not-so-perfect software they created that magical feeling really faded away.

I have to say that I met some genuinely nice and bright people, some of whom I kept as a friend till this day but many many of the people, if not most were just mediocre or even worse. Many of them didn’t really care about the quality of the work they do or they simply didn’t have the solid skills that I earlier, as an outsider always assumed. As a consequence, they also didn’t really care if I went to great lengths to produce quality software. Not only did they not care, I think I was often seen by my peers and direct superiors as someone dull and slow because I asked many questions and didn’t immediately pump out a quick but crappy solution. The “senior engineers”, the “lead developers”, the whoever were not the skilled, thorough, humble people I hoped to meet, who would inspire me and help me grow. Very few people that I met at these places (although there were some) truly inspired me personally and professionally. I’m not saying they are bad people, what I mean is that in those environments their attitude towards their work, towards their profession was not what I hoped to see. Most of them also were simply not my kind.

The people I always wanted to impress turned out not really worth impressing.

I also realised that there is a price to becoming really good at something. A steep price. It takes so so much time. Time away from something else. Economists call this “opportunity cost”. For years I aspired to be an outstanding software engineer with deep fundamentals and lots of experience so that one day I’ll be able to work on sci-fi like projects. I have a family. I love sports. I love being outdoors. We only have so much time in our lives. I can’t spend all that in front of the computer. The rockstar hackers who write the best blog posts about how they found a bug in the latest CPUs or how they wrote a compiler from scratch in 2 days or how they are building the next quantum computers probably spend less time with their families or ride their bikes less.