My Origin Story: The Job That Broke Me
Photo by Rudi Endresen on Unsplash
You can now read My Origin Story in order — from the very beginning — on its dedicated page:
There are moments in life when you don’t notice the ground shifting beneath you until it finally cracks. Leaving Synaptic wasn’t a dramatic exit. Nobody threw a chair. There were no fireworks, no screaming matches, no dramatic firings. It was quieter than that. Heavier than that. It was a slow unraveling.
The truth is, I didn’t leave Synaptic because I had a better opportunity lined up. I didn’t leave because my work there was done or because I reached some noble professional conclusion.
I left because I had become someone I didn’t like—someone my team didn’t like—and it showed.
By the time I resigned, the damage was done. My ego had blinded me. My attitude had isolated me. The excitement that once got me out of bed had vanished, replaced by something far worse than boredom: Emptiness.
So I walked away. Married. With a new baby at home. With no savings and no backup plan. It wasn’t brave. It was desperate.
And only later would I understand that this was the moment I began the real journey—not the one that teaches you how to code, but the one that forces you to confront who you are.
For the next three months, I lived in a strange limbo of soul-searching and survival. I collected unemployment, tried to stretch every dollar, and told myself to make the most of that unexpected summer at home: taking my daughter to the park, going for walks around our neighborhood streets, catching fireflies together at the end of the day. In between those moments, I sat at the computer firing off email after email, applying to every single job I could find, feeling that familiar knot in my stomach from the days right after college when I sent applications into the void and heard nothing back.
“I’d come to realize later that rock bottom isn’t a place. It’s a realization.”
It was late August when a recruiter reached out with an offer: C#/.NET Developer. New York City School Construction Authority. Public sector. Stable. Full benefits. The title sounded serious. Respectable. After feeling things fall apart at Synaptic, it felt like a chance to stabilize my life. Provide for my daughter. Be the man my family needed.
I convinced myself it was a step forward. I told myself:
“We need health insurance. We need stability. This is what responsible people do.”
So I took the job.
But here’s the truth I didn’t want to face yet:
When you take a job for fear instead of purpose, you’re already losing.
On my first day, I rode the elevator to the 5th floor of a gray government building in Long Island City—a massive block of concrete shaped like a Soviet-era municipal building. The floor was dead quiet. Rows and rows of gray cubicles stretched into the distance, very much like an endless spreadsheet.
Gone were the debates about receptor models and drug discovery. Gone were the late-night build sessions and curiosity-fueled experiments. Gone was the thrill of building something that mattered.
In its place, I now had:
Outlook email notifications
Ticket queues
Approval chains
Forms
More forms
Meetings about forms
I sat at my empty, undecorated cubicle, staring at a generic Dell tower running Windows 2000 and a 19-inch monitor the size of a microwave. No code. No whiteboard. No energy. Just silence.
I had left Synaptic to escape a version of myself I didn’t want to become. Now I was afraid I had walked straight into a place where people came to give up.
I tried to convince myself it would be fine. Plenty of people worked jobs they didn’t love. Plenty of people stayed where they didn’t feel challenged. Plenty of people stopped chasing purpose. But I had never been one of those people. Until now.
The first few weeks at the New York City School Construction Authority were quiet. Too quiet. I was assigned to a team of one—me—responsible for maintaining and “modernizing” internal reporting systems. That sounded harmless enough—until I realized modernizing really meant rewriting Crystal Reports templates in C# so they could print properly for board meetings.
I had traded real engineering work for… formatting.
The office was as lifeless as the work. Every day looked the same:
Commute for two hours to get to the office 11 miles away
9:00 AM – manually write down the time I was logging in
Refresh inbox
Fix a formatting issue
Submit for review
Wait
Log out; eat lunch at my desk; log back in
5:00 PM - manually write down the time I was logging out
Commute for another two hours to get back home
Repeat 5 times a week
No creativity. No curiosity. No collaboration. Just a beige existence.
Nobody talked about ideas. Nobody challenged anything. Nobody cared why something worked—they only cared whether Procedure 14-B had been followed.
My world had shrunk to ticket numbers and printer settings.
I began to disappear—not physically, but mentally. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t miserable. I was numb. That was worse.
At Synaptic, I had been hungry to learn. Now I felt my brain shutting down.
At Synaptic, I had been a builder. Now I was a typist holding a developer title.
At Synaptic, I had been arrogant. Now I was ashamed of what I had become.
I stopped talking in meetings. I stopped suggesting ideas. I stopped caring about anything outside of the bare minimum required.
I came in. I pretended to code. I left.
No pride. No energy. No voice.
And then the exhaustion came.
Not the physical kind but the deeper kind. The kind that follows you home. The kind that sits with you in silence while you stare at a blank wall wondering when, exactly, you disappeared.
At home, I tried to hide it. My wife had already followed me through so many unpredictable detours—from biochemistry to software—always believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. We had a baby now. A daughter. I had responsibilities. The time for chasing dreams had passed. Or so I kept telling myself.
I’d get home, eat dinner, tuck my daughter in, pretend everything was fine—and then sit in front of my computer and play World of Warcraft long after everyone went to bed. Burning inside but saying nothing.
One night, my wife asked me:
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “Just tired.”
But I wasn’t tired. I was lost.
The worst part wasn’t the work. It wasn’t the bureaucracy. It wasn’t even the boredom. It was the way I started to believe this was all I was worth.
I stopped reading code books. I stopped experimenting. I stopped learning. I stopped building things for fun. I used to love solving problems—and now I avoided them.
Every day I stayed in that job, I felt my identity slipping away, one quiet, unnoticeable piece at a time.
Purpose is a fragile thing. It doesn’t shatter. It erodes.
And once it’s gone, getting it back requires more than a job change. It requires a fight.
I didn’t break all at once. There was no dramatic moment where I stood up in the middle of a meeting and shouted, “I can’t do this anymore!” There was no slammed laptop lid, no heroic exit. No Jerry Maguire manifesto. That kind of collapse would’ve been easier, maybe even cleaner.
Mine? Mine was quiet.
It happened little by little—inside.
It was a Tuesday—the kind of day so ordinary it disappears from memory. I had been assigned yet another meaningless ticket: fix the formatting of a Crystal Report footer so it aligned properly when exporting to PDF. A three-hour meeting was scheduled to discuss it.
A meeting. For a footer.
I remember staring at the ticket. Staring through it, actually. I wasn’t thinking about how to fix it. I was thinking about how far I felt from myself.
I used to build tools that powered scientific discovery. I used to solve problems I didn’t even know how to approach at first. I used to feel fire—purpose—energy.
Now I was arguing over whether the footer text should be 10-point or 11-point font.
At some point, I realized my hand was shaking on the mouse.
What am I doing here?
That question lodged itself in me like a splinter. And once it was in, I couldn’t get it out. It followed me into the drive home. Through the 59th Street Bridge. Through the FDR and the GWB. It followed me into the kitchen while I did the dishes. It followed me into bed that night, where I stared at the ceiling long after the world went quiet.
One night, after everyone was asleep, I went to my desk in the corner of our spacious yet sparsely furnished apartment. I booted my computer. Not into Windows. Into Linux. I don’t remember which distro it was that week—maybe it was Ubuntu, but it could have easily been Debian, maybe Arch. Back then I hopped between distros the way some people change songs—curiously, searching for something that felt right.
A terminal opened. And for the first time in months, I felt my brain turn back on.
I didn’t work on anything important that night. I tweaked shell scripts. I broke and fixed my own system. I wrote a tiny Python script to automate renaming files. Completely pointless. Completely beautiful.
Then I opened Launchpad —Ubuntu’s platform—and continued what had become my secret life after dark:
Translating open source software into Brazilian Portuguese.
GNOME. KDE. Ubuntu installer strings. Desktop dialogs. Menus. UI elements.
I didn’t have money to give to open source. I didn’t have grand engineering skills yet. But I had language. I could help. And every translation I submitted, every string I fixed, made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time: Connected.
Somewhere in the world, someone I would never meet would click something in their own language—and I had helped make that happen.
That night, I received a message from another contributor I had never met:
“Obrigado pela colaboração, Og! Continue assim. Sua ajuda faz diferença.”
(“Thanks for your contribution, Og! Keep it up. Your help makes a difference.”)
I just stared at those words.
Your help makes a difference.
Nothing at work made me feel that way anymore.
But this?
This mattered.
Over the next weeks, I built a routine.
I survived work during the day.
I came home, played with my daughter, had dinner with my wife.
And when the house fell quiet—I came alive again.
I improved my Python scripting. I became even more comfortable with linux system administration. I built tiny tools just to learn. I lived on mailing lists. I asked strangers questions about sed and awk. I started helping others troubleshoot installation problems in Brazilian Linux forums. I was part of something again.
I wasn’t alone.
I didn’t have to wait for permission to build.
I didn’t have to argue in meetings to solve a problem.
I didn’t have to shrink who I was to keep a paycheck.
I could contribute. I could learn. I could grow.
That flicker inside me—the one I thought I lost—was still there. Open source didn’t just teach me technology. It gave me back my belief.
One Friday, after another day of hollow meetings, I shut down my work computer and realized something: My current job had broken me.
But it had also shown me something I had never seen so clearly before: I needed purpose more than I needed financial comfort.
I didn’t know where I was going next yet. But I knew this:
I was done being dead inside.
It was time to stop surviving.
It was time to start building again.