Reflections on 2025

I have been thinking about writing a blog for a while. Actually I have been writing diaries for most of my adult life, but I realised that writing self-reflactions for the public can also be beneficial.

There are some topics where I really need a second opinion and I have been thinking about Reddit, but let’s try this instead.

What do I want from my career?

At the end of 2024 I decided to quit my full remote job at Qonto to join GetYourGuide. The main reason here being a salary jump from 66k to 92k yearly gross. That is a 39.4% increase. I challenge anyone to say NO to that.

Now that I am 9 months into the job, I am still not sure if that was the right decision. It is true that I now make more money, almost 1k more net per month, which is A LOT, but I think that I have also lost a lot in terms of lifestyle.

My previous job at Qonto required me to go to Paris every 3 months for a few days, for many this could be a downer, but for me it was amazing. I loved the feeling of getting into an AirFrance flight from Berlin to Charles de Gaulle on a random Wednesday and spend a few days in France. Roaming around the beatiful office in Pigalle and drinking wine in Belleville. I have always been passionate about languages and I was starting to learn some French. Not as fast as I wanted but I was getting there. But then, just when I was culturally making the shift, I decided to cut it.

Everything went quickly, one Day I opened linkedin and I saw a random job posting from GetYourGuide and after a couple of weeks and 7 interviews I had a job offer with a salary bump that I could not have seen in ages at Qonto.

Now I am saving more money, but my lifestyle did not change. I am still living in Berlin and happy about it, but with much less travelling and without learning a new language.

I thought that by having more money I would still have a chance to go to Paris as much as I wanted and technically I can still learn French on my own, but I do not have that daily motivation and after all, it’s simply more interesting to go somewhere for a real reason than just for random leisure.

I have been thinking of going back to Qonto for a while and even spoke about it with a few ex-colleagues about it but the truth is, I cannot give up the money and I think that Nostalgia is playing a big role in here.

For some reason I enjoyed saying that “I work for a French Bank” more than “I work for a travel agency”.

Engineering Challenges

More importantly, when I ask myself, what kind of job do I want, I still do not have a answer.

I have been working as Android Developer for a while, more specifically since September 2019, when I did my first internship in Shanghai, but by now it’s simply not interesting anymore. I have had the chance to do a bit of BE development as well, and even though I still do not grasp the details of it, I think it’s a good practice.

What kind of career do I want? I look around at colleagues that are 5 years older than me. They are mostly all recognized as Senior Engineers, some of them even Staff, but when I look at what they do, it’s basically the same as me. They simply do it better or faster, but there is not a big difference.

So what are my own goals for the future?

Ideally I still want to make money, but I want to have a feeling of growing and achieving something which is not simply making a small change in the corner of an app.