25 years

I’ve seen things you non-IT people wouldn’t believe. Gigantic servers throwing core dumps, just before Christmas. I’ve watched load spikes glitter in Grafana, near the end of the night. Some day all those moments will be lost in time, like orphaned tickets in Jira. Time to get prescribed a pair of computer glasses.

25 years. It’s really been 25 years already. Even though I hope there’s a ‘30’ and a ‘35’ still to come¹, 25 years somehow feels special. This post is an expression of amazement at all that time. Written on a blog that has been with me for almost as long.² And yet everything actually turned out differently than I’d pictured it for myself back in 2001.

The best friend of my best friend once mentioned a rule about climbing the career ladder: “After three years you may leave, after five years you should leave, after seven years you must leave.” This woman had built a career at large corporations, and somehow, at the end of the last millennium, the rule made sense to me.

And that was my plan, too, when I started at Sun in 2001. Stick around for a few years, have Sun on my résumé, and then go looking for something else. Maybe even back into management. Possibly in another city? Perhaps even move abroad? A good plan. I thought.

I ended up in Hamburg because of an evening drive³ past the Binnenalster. That was probably the moment I fell in love with the city. It wasn’t some grand plan, but a coincidence that would shape my life profoundly. In that moment I knew I would sign in Hamburg — and therefore with Sun.

Seven years went by long ago. It’s 2026. I have refused the “must” a third time. A lot has happened. Sun was acquired by Oracle ages ago. I’m still here. By now longer at Oracle than I was at Sun. But: my work differs greatly from what my manager back then handed me that summer 25 years ago — shortly before the world changed fundamentally one morning in September. I didn’t find my growth in jumping from company to company. I’m very different from the person who, back in 2001, went looking for the entrance to the Sun office on Eiffestraße and didn’t find it right away.⁴

Why did I stay? It certainly wasn’t, and isn’t, “all sunshine and rainbows.”⁵ Nothing is, for that long. Nothing is, forever. Anyone who says that about a span of 25 years is leaning on the mercy of selective memory. But you don’t grow in a place where you can’t learn something every day. You don’t gain anything if you can’t pass something on to someone every day. You don’t move forward once curiosity withers. In these 25 years, I got to learn, to teach, to be curious — every single day.

Many remarkable people crossed my path: from that gentleman at the reception desk of the Frankfurt office, who had a phenomenal memory for names and faces, to the woman who invented the damned Spanning Tree. When I walk through a city, I can see all the places where I contributed just a little bit.

And finally: you don’t spend 25 years at a company without the line between colleagues and friends blurring, in places beyond recognition. Or without building a level of respect and trust with some people that goes far beyond what professional life calls for.

If you want to hear the universe laugh, make a plan. Looking back on the last quarter of a century, that laughter doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.⁶