why I decided to take a career break
In the six months leading up to June 2023 I seriously considered quitting my job multiple times. On paper, I had a great salary and I was on track for a promotion. I had been working in IT infrastructure in banking for about 6-7 years. I had just received received an unexpectedly large bonus in the previous performance period and I was hitting goals and performing above the expectations my role. On paper it all seemed pretty good. But I was desperately unhappy.
I was consumed by a daunting feeling that although I was succeeding in the role, I was pigeonholing myself into a particular niche with a limited upside on the skillset I was building and this was not a good long term strategy. My thinking was strongly influenced by these factors:
- Given the release of GPT-4 and it’s proof that scaling laws were real and do in fact seem to hold, my timelines for how quickly we were moving towards a world with more generalised AI was shortening. Things appeared to be moving far quicker than most people expected.
- LLM’s are going to eliminate many white collar jobs in enterprise technology (that largely exist due to inefficiencies) as one worker now gains an enormous amount of leverage to perform more duties than they previously could. I.e. Workload won’t reduce, but the amount of work (productivity) of a single worker will ballon.
- A huge number of jobs in enterprise technology exist because of inefficiencies and risk/regulatory busywork and these can and should be automated. I felt that most of the work I was doing fell into this bucket, if i’m being honest.
- Squeezing out the bottom of the market of low-skilled or semi-skilled tech workers through automation will cause more and more to compete for the mid-level and higher positions creating a tediously competitive environment, tight labour market and reduced job security.
- Finally, I wasn’t convinced I was building the kinds of skills I wanted to. Being a Tech BA honestly felt too easy. I wanted more challenge; I wanted to be pushing myself to the edge of my intellectual limits. To be doing something where I could always learn more and build deeper skills; and importantly something that felt like it had a creative element to it.
I knew the world was changing rapidly and I needed to do something to position myself better for the future that was hurtling towards me. I wanted to keep up with the change. I wanted to be part of the change, not a victim of it. So I left.
compounding factors
In the years prior to this I had come into contact with a few very powerful attractors:
- meditation, psychedelics and “inner work”,
- cryptocurrency,
- large language models
Each of these attractors had consumed my interest and attention for enormous periods of time and I would happily say I was obsessed with each of these at different points. What came up for me during each of these periods was a feeling of exhilaration and excitement about being part of the frontiers of innovation and change - these forces were so powerful that they were shaking the very foundations of the world despite all of its inertia and resistance of change.
I felt very strongly that whatever I did next, I wanted to cultivate a skillset that could allow me to be directly involved with the change that was rapidly taking place in the world.
what i’m up to
Right now I am focusing my efforts primarily in the following areas:
- Fullstack software development
- Understanding AI Governance and Security better
- Understanding how different payment rails work and next gen implementations
- Developing a platform for mental health specifically focusing on body image issues among young men
- Meditation; deeply exploring different approaches and buddhist traditions
Some stuff i’ve done:
- Travel
- Meditation Retreats
- Moved to a new city
- Explored different career paths
- Networking
- Focused on health and fitness
- Taught myself to code