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 39% gross salary increase. I loved my job at Qonto but 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, 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, I don’t really have a reason to go anymore.

I have been thinking of what it would have been if I had stayed at Qonto and even spoke about it with a few ex-colleagues, but the truth is, it is hard to give up the money and I think that Nostalgia is playing a big role in here.

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 achieve my financial goals, 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.

There are a few roles that I would like to explore, such as Forward Deployed Engineer and Solutions Engineer. Both roles require much less coding and more interactions with clients. I still need to dig deeper into these roles, but I think that on a span of 5 - 10 years I would enjoy more having relationships with clients and occasionally travelling than simply “implementing the ideas of a product manager and a designer”. Of course there is more to that in Android Development. But I realised that it doesn’t fulfill me anymore, and it is time to look for something more than a simple salary bump.

What about building a Startup?

While studying engineering at University I strongly thought that that would be my path. I have been reading about it for years. I admire founders much more than anyone else in the industry, and I am sure I am not the only one.

The social confirmation of being able to build a product and the immense gain that one can reach through it are simply unbeatable, but at the same time, I am starting to doubt myself to ever have the guts to do it.

For some reason I always thought that in my twenties I had to experiment as much as possible, so that by the age of 30 I would be sure about what I wanted to do, but now that I am 29 years old, I see that I still have the same insecurities that I had when I was 24. Probably even more.

I am not sure if that’s going to change in 2026, but I still want to believe that at some point I will magically wake up with enough motivation to look deeper into it.

The most scary part about this is that I am afraid of losing a salary. How am I supposed to live for the first few months and years of Entrepreneurship? Of course I can count on my savings and on the German Unemployement system, but do I really have the guts to go all in?

What amount of savings will make me think: now I can jump into it? And is it really about enough savings, or are there more things blocking me?

Hopefully writing about it will help me uncover a few stones.