I recently left my job with the intention to change career at the ripe age of 36. I’ve been an iOS developer for 12 years and a professional poker player for the 6 years before that.
iOS development gave me almost everything I wanted. A career I enjoyed, was good at, paid well, could work remotely and even work part-time. I’m incredibly lucky to have had this and if things don’t pan out I’ll likely go back to it.
Why
In 2022 I had my first interview with 80,000 hours, a career service specialised in moving people in to high impact altruistic jobs. Things were going good for my career, I had just landed my highest paying role at a company with a great culture and timezoneless remote working. However I still felt there was something missing, my last few jobs had been working on gambling or social media apps. I liked the code, but not the product and I was likely having a negative impact on the world around me. I wanted to solve problems that benefit humanity which in turn would give me as much enthusiasm about the product I’m working on as the code I write for it.
2023 I went part time to train up in deep learning on my day off. 2024 I switched from Tumblr’s iOS team to our internal deep learning team.
When
April 2nd 2025 I wake up in my apartment in HoChiMinh city and find an email for myself and 16% of Automattic that we’ve been made redundant. It was a shock at first but it came with a generous severance package at a time when our team was increasingly moving away from Deep-learning projects. The time to make the switch real was at hand.
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