I’ve spent most of my time during college behind an IDE, working. I was one of the fortunate students to have a full time job while continuing my education.
It was great. I had great colleagues, a good salary, and most importantly high trust, in an environment where I was asked to give opinions.
I had a lot of fun building, solving challenges, teaching, and building relationships with colleagues. Not everyone came from the same background, and that made it even more interesting.
What was hard was that some people viewed building software as a classic 8 to 5 job where nothing should change: no improvement, no new frameworks, no new tech. Like being stuck in 2012 forever. I’m not criticizing old tools if they do the job but here, they didn’t.
I was fortunate enough to have my managers’ trust, and especially the CEO’s trust, to lead change: to suggest, collaborate, and push things forward. I was closely monitored, and I was that guy the one who kept nagging, wanting new tools and workflows, introducing changes, sometimes being picky about how we should work. I introduced code reviews and an entirely new development workflow for frontend developers.
It’s actually great to be in a startup. I think I would’ve hated life back then in a corporate environment.
I had the ability to fly literally. I asked to work on the backend. It wasn’t easy to get at first, but I eventually did and had the chance to learn from very good people and work with brilliant ones. I asked to work on mobile, and I joined the mobile team. I put my nose into ops and machines and became responsible for machines, tools, and servers.
It was a great time. Really great. I spent weekends planning things to do, things to improve, because the only limit was my imagination nothing else. Building something? I can. Deploying it? I can. Hosting any tools or packages we need? I can. I could do the full circle without anyone interrupting.
Then came the moment I understood I couldn’t do too many things at once. At first, it felt good like being Superman in a village but it was exhausting. Context switching, constantly thinking about everything that needed to be done. It was really tiring.
That’s when the importance of having people you can rely on really hit me. But like many engineers, I had that feeling that no one could do it better than me. I had to accept shipping features that felt crappy to me not the way I imagined them because I learned the hard way that technical skills are far, far easier than dealing with real people who don’t give a shit about building. They want to leave at 5 and now, I totally get it but back then, I was so frustrated.
I got pulled into that tension. I read most tech leadership books, but they didn’t help with everyone. Management sometimes required people to be non technical because there wasn’t time to build, and the thought of me not building scared me.
It was really fun… until sales stopped. Financial difficulties came, clients stopped paying, and those were very bad and very poor days.
Deciding to leave all that legacy was terrifying. I kept waiting, being patient, thinking maybe we could do it again. The day I decided to leave, I couldn’t sleep. When I informed the CEO, he was incredibly understanding. I respect that deeply and he’s become a very good friend.
And then, one random Thursday around 3 PM, I left. I picked up my stuff, said goodbye to the colleagues who weren’t on a day off, and left quietly.
It was hard. Two and a half years. Every morning with the same people. Every line of code I’d written. Every machine I’d configured.
What made it harder wasn’t just leaving a job it was leaving a version of myself. The builder who could touch everything, the chaos, the freedom, the endless ideas written on weekends. Walking away felt like closing hundreds of open tabs in my head, knowing some of them would never be reopened.
But leaving also taught me something I couldn’t have learned by staying: that passion without limits eventually turns into exhaustion, and that impact isn’t measured by how many things you touch, but by how long what you build survives without you.
I didn’t leave angry. I didn’t leave defeated. I left tired, grateful, and proud. Proud of the systems that ran, the people who grew, the mistakes I made, and the trust I was given far earlier than I probably deserved.
That chapter ended quietly no applause, no drama. Just a door closing behind me.
And that was okay.
Some chapters are meant to end that way, so the next one can be written with clearer hands.