My career-long struggle with picking challenge or beauty

Why I keep trading a stable career path for a detour in doing beautiful work

Paul Klee, “Castle and Sun”

I always find it hard to tell recruiters about my background.

Many of them expect a straightforward reply containing no more than a couple of languages and a two-digit years-of-experience count.

So you’re a JavaScript developer?
Well, yes, but not exactly...
You’re a front-end developer?
Well, I currently build UIs, but I’ve also worked with Kafka
What position are you applying for again?

My career path looks like the worst possible implementation of the shortest-path algorithm.

I take detours, I go sightseeing, sometimes I get way too focused on the path, and sometimes I forget there’s even a path in the first place. So while a friend of mine can say he’s been a Java developer for the last decade, I have to kick off every intro call with:

It all started in the long winter of 2014

And the reason I’m the bane of recruiters around the world is that I’m constantly torn between beauty and challenge.

It’s obvious why challenging work is important.

It’s interesting, it’s fulfilling, it gives you bragging rights, it’s well-paid, and it has better job security.

I don’t need to tell you more than that.

Beauty is different.

You can have all the things above without your work having the abstract quality we call beauty. It requires effort to create and taste to appreciate it. Most importantly, it doesn’t guarantee you a higher salary.

Beauty is a cruel mistress, and I blame her for my inability to follow a linear, boring path into middle management.

But the underlying reason is soviet architecture (bear with me).

Why I need beauty in my work

I was born and raised in post-communist Bulgaria, where for half a century people prioritized utility over aesthetics. There are enormous neighborhoods made up of tall grey squares (the infamous panelka buildings) where the only important quality was their ability to stand upright.

Windows were a bonus.

And since the law allows people to manage their part of the building property as they see fit, they painted, insulated, and developed them without any thought for consistency or aesthetics.

Every building like this is a monument to misunderstood individualism and a counter-example for beauty.

Not even the worst example

When my eyes first felt the pleasure of seeing the colourful, consistent, playful architecture of modern buildings, I decided I needed more of that in my life. Not architecture per se, but beauty, aesthetics.

A long career of detours

My career has been a constant attempt to balance beauty and challenge.

I started off looking for beauty and applied for a front-end internship in a design studio, but on my first day, they told me I’d need to focus on back-end instead.

So I spent the first few years watching beauty from the sidelines.

When I finally got to do front-end full-time in 2017, it was amazing. I got to work on a design system and build beautiful pages while others sweat on configuring Zookeeper correctly.

It’s the kind of work that requires focus, study, and precision, but it’s not difficult in the traditional sense.

I can’t describe it.

It’s just as hard, but it doesn’t fire up the puzzle-solving part of my brain enough, and when it’s idle for too long, I get the itch to use it like I need a stretch after a long sleep.

Then, in 2019, I overcorrected.

I got a job writing CI pipelines and setting up cloud infrastructure, writing more VCL and YAML than JavaScript. Absolutely no beauty in sight there, and for some reason, I had little need of it for 4 years.

Looking back, it’s insane that they gave me a shot at infra without previous experience, but that company believed that engineers shouldn’t be siloed in disciplines, and I took the chance to un-silo myself from front-end work as quickly as possible.

Whenever I had a yin-yang episode and needed beauty, I’d spend time on software design, design patterns, and maintainability practices to put some beauty in the logical work, to sneak some art into the science.

But all in all, I was careermaxxing like a madman at that time.

My tunnel vision on challenging work turned into a speedrun into engineering management, and there I felt like I was in the Soviet-era neighborhood again - all utility, no beauty.

In 2023, I noped out of management and got a job as an individual contributor focused mostly on front-end work.

Where I’m finding challenge and beauty now

That’s a long way to say I find way too many things interesting and can’t focus on one of them for more than 3-4 years.

Lately, LLMs have turned my reward system inside out, and that doesn’t help either.

They have put difficulty, logic, and beauty all together into the blender, and I’m not sure if the result tastes good. There’s more difficulty everywhere, beauty is less commercially appreciated, and the sense of fulfillment lives in smaller corners of the work.

One positive development is that the people who actually appreciate beauty long for it so much more when everyone is drowning in mass-produced software.

I’ve identified web animations with Motion as an intersection of the Venn diagram between difficulty and beauty, and I’m spending disproportionate amounts of time on them right now.

Complex front-end work seems to be the cure.

But more on that in the follow-up article, I guess.