It's been over three months since I resigned from what most people would consider a top tier software engineering job. High pay, difficult problems, and truly intelligent colleagues to learn from and work with. I'm now completely independent (read unemployed) and just moved to Aix en Provence (France) after 29 years in the UK.
This first episode of my probably weekly newsletter will set the scene for how we got here, provide some context behind decisions I'm making as I pursue a new life as an independent engineer/founder, and give a flavour of what to expect in future episodes.
If you've subscribed to this newsletter, we've probably already met, messaged on LinkedIn, or maybe we worked together. For anyone that's completely new, I've spent the last few years as a commercial software engineer at some of the most intense and profitable organisations in the world . Before that, I was completing my PhD at the University of York, and before that I was doing my undergraduate in computer science at the University of Hull.
I would describe this almost 11 year journey as a collection of the most 'failing forwards' moments imaginable. I almost dropped out of my PhD in the final months because I'd fallen out of love with the research. I happened to land a job at Squarepoint - a top tier competitive hedge fund - because a recruiter on LinkedIn sent me a message. I got a job at Vitol - the largest independent commodity trading company in the world - because my friend had moved there from Squarepoint and wanted to work together (shout out Rohan). Then to now, having reached a great job in a massively successful company I began to question, is this what I want, or have I just been failing forwards?
Since the times where my only furniture was a desk, chair, and mattress on the floor (not much has changed*), I have questioned the role that I want ownership to play in my life and in my work. For example, as a software engineer, the software that you write, extend, and support, is wholly owned by your employer. This means that if your software gains widespread adoption, or leads to significant profits for the firm, you are not directly rewarded. Instead, its success will probably be bundled in to your annual/bi-annual review, and maybe you'll receive an amount larger than you were expecting, but nothing directly proportional to the success of your software. Ownership isn't a part of the story.
Against the backdrop of other industries this makes total sense - a carpenter doesn't receive any bonuses if a staircase they build supports 1000 people or 10,000 over its lifetime. However, unlike physical industries software exists in the digital world, where it's more about the context that your code is executing in, rather than the code itself (although sometimes the code itself can also be pretty impressive, apparently).
This means that although anyone can copy-paste your software, the benefit comes from providing it as a service rather than just as an artefact. To follow the carpenter analogy, software is about enabling movement between places, not adding steps to a structure, but is unique in that there is essentially no barrier to owning the structure. All this to say; if you don't own the end result of your labour, then you can never stop trading your time for money . If however you own the software you produce, and can provide its outputs or usage to others, then you can begin to trade your software for money, which opens the door to true financial, time, location, and intellectual independence - which I think is a worthwhile pursuit.
Short answer: I'm not sure. But, I'm willing to back myself to use every available resource, every connection, and every moment in my day** to find out, and this newsletter will be a collection of notes, findings, and resources I find along the way to inspire you to do the same.
Longer answer: You have to take deliberate action against your own short-term best interests, and give yourself the space to find out. At least, that's what I'm telling myself I'm doing, and not recklessly sacrificing my own financial stability, housing, and employment prospects with (almost) no clear plan. The plan is to find a plan.
I'm out of the furnace, and into the fiery hellscape that is independent engineering in 2025. A year where AI slop is polluting the internet, where vibe coding is coming for senior engineering jobs (just like self-driving cars and other hype cycles...), and where if you're not building a unicorn with a $100M loan you're not doing it right. It's exciting, scary, and I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn along the way.
To get started, I'm going to build a distributed technical infrastructure with the goal of steadily adding capabilities and providing them to organisations that couldn't normally afford it. I'm not looking to build the next Uber, or land a rover on Mars, but would instead like to focus on building a company in which high quality engineering matters, where I'm free to work with new and interesting people across different industries, and which could scale at a reliable and predictable pace - a big change from the years in the furnace. So, if this sounds like something you might be interested in, please get in touch.
If you've read this far, then I hope this all made sense, and that you're interested and excited to see how this journey plays out.
If you'd like to support me, please forward this message to your entire company, or mention reading this article to get out of an awkward silence. Next episode will be about the first week in hell 😉
All the best,
Oliver
*mattress is no longer on floor
**in a non-hustle-culture kind of way, there might be an episode on neurodivergence/special interests in the future, but please go outside and touch grass sometimes