Why I Quit My Solution Architect Job
I had been working in software development for a couple of years when a breaking change to my career was triggered. I left for a long maternity leave.
However strange this may sound, these were three sabbatical years. Not in the sense of having nothing to do, but in the sense of being able to step out of the daily job routine and take a look at things from a different angle. While being alone with kids at home, without having any serious mental work to do, I was more and more leaning into learning new things. I was stealing every free hour to develop an Android App for kids, to produce a sci-fi audiobook, to regularly answer questions from the community on stackoverflow.com, and so on. But this was not where it stopped.
Eventually, I started to review what was good and bad in my former job and this brought me to dig deeper into IT project methodologies. While I had a vague (mis)understanding of agile mostly coming from jokes on “how this does not work”, the book Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) changed my mind. I found agile to be a concept of intrinsic value.
Once I was back from maternity leave, my desire to work in an agile environment grew. I did a presentation of what I learned about DAD and agile principles to my managers and the whole department. While I was not successful in persuading the company to give it a try, soon…
