After two years of being back in the (enterprise) software engineering industry, I’m back out. In January 2024, I wrote a long post about leaving academia; why I couldn’t get a foot in the door; why I probably didn’t try hard enough; and my fears of losing touch with practice.

Well guess what. I’m back into education. I wouldn’t dare to call it academia though: I’m now a lecturer at a local university college, where I teach applied computer science. While the institution is quite active in conducting (applied) research, I’m not a part of it. Contrary to my last job in education, where I divided my time between 50% teaching and 50% research, this time, my job is 100% teaching.

It feels weird to write about my professional journey the last two years. In September 2023, I received my PhD in Engineering Technology and was in constant dubio state whether to try and stick around or return to my roots—the software engineering industry. My long practical experience turned out to be a blessing for the students but a curse for any tenure track: not enough papers published, not enough cool looking venues to stick on the CV.

So I left. I wanted a bit more freedom and I started freelancing under my own company. At my first client, I was a tech lead and Go programmer. Go was fun until if err != nil got the better of me, but the problem wasn’t Go, it was enterprise IT, mismanagement, over-ambitiousness, and of course, Kubernetes. I forgot why I turned to education in the first place. I regretted leaving academia and felt I made the wrong choice.

About a year later, an ex-colleague called and asked if I was in need of a new job. I wasn’t, and yet I was. I joined their startup and the lack of meetings and ability to write code for a change felt like a breath of fresh air.

Eight months later, we had a second kid. Everything changed—again.

While we hoped for the best, the baby turned out to be as troublesome as the first: 24/7 crying (ourselves included), excessively puking sour milk, forgoing sleeping, … We’re this close (gestures wildly) to a mental breakdown. Then the eldest got ill and had to go to the hospital. Then my wife got ill and had to go to the hospital. I’m still waiting on my turn, I guess it’s only a matter of time.

Needless to say, my professional aspirations took a deep dive. I tried to do my best to keep up with everything, both at home and at work, but had the feeling that I was failing at both. Something had to give.

Even though my client was still satisfied with my work, I quit. The kids were the tipping point, but that wasn’t the only reason: the startup environment didn’t exactly provide ample opportunities to coach/teach others, which was something that I sorely missed even though I didn’t realise this in the beginning.

Finding another client with more concrete coaching/teaching opportunities would have been an option but it wouldn’t suddenly provide breathing room. I’m currently replacing someone who went the other way and he had a 70% teaching assignment. In the coming semester, There’s 30% more waiting for me. Meanwhile, I can assist my wife in helping with the baby. There are of course other benefits from working in education, such as having all school holidays off, which is both a blessing (we’re screwed otherwise) and a curse (yay more kids-time instead of me-time).

That also means I’m in the process of closing down my own business. Most people will no doubt declare me crazy: from freelancing in IT to a government contract with fixed pay scales in (IT) education—that’s quite a hefty downgrade, financially speaking. Or is it? I tried examining these differences before. We of course did our calculations to see if it would be a possibility.

Still, it feels a bit like a failure, having to close the books on Brain Baking BV1. Higher education institutions don’t like working with freelance teachers and this time I hope I’m in there for the long(er) run. I could of course still do something officially “on the side” but who am I kidding? This article should have been published days ago but didn’t because of pees in pants, screams at night and over-tiredness of both parents.

The things I’m teaching now are not very familiar to me: Laravel & Filament, Vue, React Native. They’re notably front-end oriented and much more practical than I’m used to but meanwhile I’m learning and I’m helping others to learn. I’ve already been able to enthuse a few students by showing them some debugging tools, shortcuts, and other things on the side, but I’m not fooling myself: like in every schooling environment, there are plenty of students less than willing to swallow what you have to say.

That’s another major thing I have to learn: to be content. To do enough. To convince myself I don’t need to do more. I’ve stopped racing along with colleagues that are willing to fight to climb some kind of invisible ladder long ago. At least, I think I did: sometimes I still feel a sudden stab of jealousy when I hear they got tenured as a professor or managed to do x or y.

At this very moment, managing to crawl in and out of bed will do.

BV is the Belgian equivalent to LLC. ↩︎

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