Every year around this time, I sit down and try to write a blog post about my work anniversary at Autodesk. For the last five years, I have never published any of those blog posts. This is due to a mix of reasons, but mainly one: I write a lot of posts that I never publish because I feel there is too much noise. Second, it merges with my holidays, and then it's too late to publish.
This year, as it's my fifth anniversary, I've promised myself I will publish it no matter what. In the last two years, Product Management has become more popular among the AECO folks. More often now, I get contacted through LinkedIn about how I transitioned to my current role. My answer is always the same: this just happened to me; I didn’t aim for this. At some point, I will write a blog post about product, but today's post is about Autodesk and my career.
When I was 23 and studying architectural engineering in Copenhagen, I loved expressing architecture through technology. This was through a very early-stage Revit at the time (2008), Rhino, and Grasshopper. One of my good friends, who is now a very talented software engineer, mentioned to me, “You know you don’t have to work for architects all your life, right? You know you can move to a technology company.” He saw how much I enjoyed the intersection of technology and architecture/construction and encouraged me to pursue a career in that intersection. Fast forward to me moving to London, my career was fully immersed in that edge connecting two worlds that, for me, never made sense separated.
I need to point out that, for those who don’t know, I have made multiple parallel moves in my career. I didn’t study architecture as my first major. I did Art History. I wanted to be a curator and loved contemporary art, again in the intersection of art, experience, and performance, like Bill Viola.
Throughout my life, something I struggle to understand is why humans place knowledge into buckets of categories that don't really make sense to those of us curious about everything. My career has been a mix of fulfilling that curiosity, continuously learning, and adapting to things that are not familiar while still somehow connected to the next one. In my head, the progression from art to architecture to construction to technology has been a very logical sequence because all of them are present in one another somehow.
When the opportunity to work at Autodesk came along, I was working on the biggest project of my career in terms of size and budget, with probably the most ambitious requirements. A part of me remembered my friend's comment, and my gut feeling said, “do it.” I admit that most of my career decisions have been based on gut feelings. I also thought, “I’ll fix these products” – little did I know how challenging it is to build software products for AECO.
I will bluntly admit it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. In the past years at Autodesk, I have worked with the smartest people in my career. It required me to adapt to very different ways of working, learn from many cultures, and overall gave me the opportunity to work on products that many of my old construction colleagues use today. I get to have an impact on the industry I love in a different way, and at the moment with Tandem, to work on early-stage technology with a truly amazing team.
Now time for holidays before I embark into another year at Tandem and Autodesk.
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