BD #1: Product, Team & Mission matter for 9-5 excitement.

09 November 2025 | 3 min read

Braindump #1: What makes work exciting and why I crave more.

Braindumps are more like journal entries.
They help me gather my thoughts and work through stuff that’s keeping me awake at night. Sometimes I come to conclusions mid article, sometimes I change my mind while writing.
This is probably the most honest insight into my brain you’ll get.

Product, Team and Mission matter for 9-5 excitement.

I landed my first SWE role in Dec. 2022 and I’ve been working at that company until June 2025. Absolutely loved it there, loved the people, and it genuinely felt like friends just working together.

Projects were rather short, ranging from 2 to 12 months, and there were plenty of learning opportunities due to different tech being used.

However, projects were rarely of enterprise size or maintained for a prolonged period, and I knew that this would be something I’d have to experience in a bigger corporate structure. I mean we built software that ended up being used by a lot of users and we even shipped multiple solutions for the german government, but still, the scale was not as big as in larger companies handling ridiculous amounts of data and users. Also I feel like I needed to experience something more long-term, where you can see the evolution of a product over multiple years.

Changed jobs: bigger team, bigger company, bigger project.

And now?

I’m still learning a lot on the job, mainly about architectural decisions that need to be made when building for scale, modularity to reuse components, and performance optimizations in both front- and backend. I’m becoming a well-rounded engineer, and my own performance and problem-solving skills have gotten a lot better.

I can navigate through big codebases better, understand systems, analyze foreign code, and figure out how to manipulate it to achieve what I want. Colleagues are nice; with some, I’m closer than with others, but everyone’s helpful and I can’t say anything bad.

It’s still not as it was at the other place, but I think that’s just something that changes once you switch from a smaller company to a bigger corporation. Also, the avg. age is higher now, and most of us seem to prefer working remotely. That contributes too.

Before, I used to visit the office 3-5 times a week, just for the people. Now I’m lucky to meet half of the team on a planned office day.

I enjoy most of the problems I work on, and the act of writing software and solving problems will never get boring to me. Just the product that I’m working on doesn’t excite me.

That’s probably the biggest change for me. Most of the stuff that I worked on before I could see myself using or being “cool.” Now I work on something useful but personally not my cup of tea, mainly because I’m not anywhere near the target demographic.

All cool, still enjoy my work. But I need a bit more to do: more agency, more features, cool things to build, excitement for the mission in the team.

Now I get all of this from side projects. Or at least I try to. But that brings its own set of problems.

More about this in the next braindump.