It can't be that hard. That was genuinely the thought that got me into tech.

Just… ego. 🗣

I looked at the industry from the outside, the complexity, the way people talked about technology like it was some exclusive club and I remember thinking:

Surely I can figure this out!

And that was enough to start. What I didn’t expect? That staying would require something completely different.  

You Don’t Stay for the Ego, You Stay for the Building

Ego gets you in. It doesn’t keep you here.

At some point, the excitement of simply “being in tech” disappears. The titles become normal. The tools stop feeling impressive. You realise nobody actually has everything figured out.

And then you’re left with the real question:

Do you actually enjoy building things?

At Osome, one of the things I enjoy most is that the work never stays static for very long. There’s always a new challenge, a new system, a better process, a different way of approaching a problem.

Some days it’s building features. Some days it’s fixing workflows that quietly break everything downstream. Some days it’s questioning whether the thing you’re building should even exist in the first place. 

Frameworks trend and disappear. Best practices evolve every few years. And now AI is rewriting entire workflows faster than most people expected.

But the excitement of building something from scratch? That never really goes away.

The Skill Nobody Talks About: Knowing How Things Break

One of the most valuable lessons I learned didn’t come from a course or a tutorial. It came from a mentor, a woman in tech who completely shifted how I think. She told me:

One of the most underrated skills is
figuring out how something will fail.

Everyone loves building. Brainstorming. Shipping new ideas. But very few people pause and ask, "Where does this break?"

If you can develop the instinct to spot failure early;  in a system, a feature, a process. You become incredibly valuable. Because you’re not just building things. You’re protecting them.

Now, here’s the uncomfortable part.

When you’re the person constantly pointing out risks, people might label you as negative. Difficult. Overly critical.

Ignore that.

That’s not negativity. That’s foresight!

Burnout Doesn’t Announce Itself Nicely

There was a day I woke up and had a very clear thought:

If I have to look at a screen today, I might actually throw up.

No warning. No slow lead-up. Just a hard stop. So I did something simple — I stepped away. 🚶🏻‍♀️‍➡️

No laptop. No “just checking Slack”. Nothing.

If you’re not careful, this job will take a lot from you, and it’s hard to recover.

Here’s the truth most people won’t emphasise enough:

Working hard is expected. Taking care of yourself is your responsibility. Set boundaries. Take breaks. Listen to your body.

Because longevity in tech isn’t about who can push the hardest. It’s about who can sustain it.

The Biggest Lie About Tech Careers

People think being a great software engineer means being great at technology.

It doesn’t.

I’ve seen programming languages rise and fall. Frameworks trend and disappear. Tools get replaced. And now, AI is changing everything again.

But the core job? Exactly the same. You are a problem solver.

Your job is to:

Because reality looks like this:

And your job is to navigate that tension.

The Easiest Part of Engineering Is Making It Work

This is where a lot of junior engineers get it wrong. They think the goal is to get things working.

But that’s just the baseline. Even in university, the rule was simple:
If it doesn’t work, don’t submit it.

In the real world? That’s the easy part. The hard part is zooming out.

Understanding how everything connects; the users, the stakeholders, the business, the constraints and then making decisions with all of that in mind.

Every line of code you write should reflect that.

Even if… it’s not you writing it anymore.

Final Thought: Your Tools Will Change, Your Mindset Shouldn’t

Tech will keep evolving. Faster than you expect. New languages. New frameworks. New AI tools writing code for you.

If you tie your identity to tools, you’ll constantly feel like you’re falling behind. But if you focus on thinking, on problem solving, you’ll always be relevant.

So yes, maybe you start with:

It can’t be that hard.

But if you want to last, you’ll need to become someone who can say:

“This is complex and I know how to figure it out.”