Quitting Comfort: I'm attending Recurse
June 16, 2025
After 3 years at JPMorgan Chase, my last day was this past Friday. I’m trading my comfortable corporate job for a summer of challenging, exciting, (and unpaid) learning at Recurse Center’s Summer 2 batch.
Yes, you read that right. I’m leaving a well-paying position at one of the world’s largest banks to attend what might sound like a “writer’s retreat for programmers.” And honestly? I’ve never been more excited about a career decision.
The Golden Handcuffs Are Real
The team I was on and the passionate engineers I met along the way were great and truly valuable. Working on Digital Identity as a Service, building mobile-first platforms with end-to-end encryption, contributing to open identity standards—this was meaningful work. I led teams across backend, mobile, and React Native, building reusable security components and working on problems that mattered.
But somewhere along the way, I realized I was optimizing for the wrong things. My days became predictable: sprint planning, code reviews, control meetings, deployment cycles, repeat. I was solving interesting problems within established frameworks, but they were always someone else’s problems, constrained by someone else’s priorities.
Then there’s the AI factor. The direction is clear: AI is getting better at the routine parts of programming, fast. The value that matters today might not be the value that matters in five years.
I need to evolve before I have to. I need to climb the value chain while I have the luxury of choice, not when I’m forced to by circumstance.
But it’s not just about staying relevant—it’s about being useful for the problems that matter. As AI capabilities explode, so do the privacy and identity challenges we’re facing as a society. Someone needs to be working on the hard problems of keeping humans in control of their own data, their own identity, their own agency. That’s the kind of work that requires human insight, not just pattern matching.
The scariest part? I was getting good at being comfortable doing work that, directionally, was becoming less uniquely human. And comfort, I’ve realized, is the enemy of growth.
Why I’m Betting on Myself
Recurse Center is the antithesis of corporate comfort. No salary, no predetermined projects, no manager telling you what to prioritize. Just you, other passionate programmers, and the terrifying freedom to work on whatever you think will make you better.
That terrifying part? That’s exactly why I need to do this.
I want to remember what it feels like to be bad at something again. To struggle with concepts that don’t come naturally. To build something not because it meets business requirements, but because it excites me. To have conversations about code that aren’t limited by sprint velocity or quarterly OKRs.
At RC, I’ll be surrounded by people who chose learning over comfort, curiosity over security. I want to find that part of myself again that I had at Ghostery—the part that stayed up until 3am hacking on cutting-edge privacy technology not because it was my job, but because we genuinely believed we could fight back against the pervasive surveillance apparatus of internet tracking.
We were solving problems that had never been solved before, often in ways that didn’t exist yet. I thrived on building something from nothing, on deep technical challenges that required understanding systems down to the kernel level.
Somewhere in the transition to enterprise technology, I started optimizing for different things. Important things, like leading teams and driving business impact. But I miss the version of myself who would spend weekends diving deep into network protocols or cryptography just because a problem demanded it.
I want to build things that require genuine human insight. I want to solve problems that need creative leaps. I want to be the kind of programmer who uses AI as a powerful tool, not someone who can be replaced by one.
The Plan (And Why It Matters More Than Ever)
While I don’t have a detailed roadmap for my time at RC, I do have some direction. My background is in privacy and security—it’s what originally drew me to programming and what I keep coming back to when I think about problems worth solving.
As AI becomes more ubiquitous, we’re facing privacy and identity challenges that most people haven’t even begun to grapple with. How do we maintain privacy when AI can infer incredibly personal details from seemingly innocuous data? How do we prove identity in a world where AI can generate convincing deepfakes? How do we build systems that protect human agency as AI becomes more capable?
These aren’t abstract future problems—they’re happening now, and we need better solutions.
I’ll be working on some hard privacy and identity problems with old colleagues and friends who share this urgency. The specific technical focus matters less than reconnecting with the kinds of challenges that made me want to be a programmer in the first place: problems that matter, problems that affect real people, problems that need creative human solutions.
Maybe I’ll contribute to open source projects that actually matter. Maybe I’ll finally tackle some of the cryptographic problems I’ve been thinking about. Maybe I’ll pair program with someone brilliant and remember what it feels like to be completely absorbed in a technical challenge.
Comfortable Is the Enemy
Look, I know this sounds privileged. Not everyone can afford to leave a stable job for unpaid learning. I’m incredibly fortunate to be in a position where I can take this risk.
That’s exactly why the time is now. Comfort compounds. What feels like a reasonable risk today might feel reckless in five years, impossible in ten.
The programmers I most admire aren’t the ones who optimized for comfort. They’re the ones who kept learning, kept growing, kept taking risks on themselves.
What Happens Next?
I don’t know, and that’s the point.
Maybe I’ll come out of RC with a startup idea. Maybe I’ll find my way into a role at a company that values the same things I do. Maybe I’ll realize I want to work on completely different problems than I thought.
What I do know is that I’ll be a different programmer—and person—than I am today. I’ll have stories about the time I spent three months learning for the pure joy of it. I’ll have connections with people who chose growth over comfort. I’ll have the confidence that comes from betting on yourself and winning.
The corporate world will still be there when I’m done. But this opportunity to step outside of it, to remember why I fell in love with programming in the first place, to surround myself with people who share that passion—this is rare.
So, I’m trading comfort for growth, security for adventure, a paycheck for the chance to become a bit closer to the programmer I’d like to be.
I can’t wait to see what happens next.
I’ll be starting at Recurse Center on June 30th. You can follow my journey on this blog where I hope to keep a journal on what I’ve learned.