Sometimes it’s enough to know what you don’t want to do

Sometimes you don’t need to know what you want to do with your life. It’s enough to understand very clearly what you don’t want to do.

It was late 2007, and while I was finishing my specialist degree in Computer Science in Ferrara, I had started working for a local software company.

Technically it was my second job as an IT person: the first had been as a systems administrator for the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the university.

But that was my first real employment contract… and also my last.

It lasted just six months.

And they were probably among the most intense and formative six months of my career.

Figure it out

I had been hired to replace someone who was leaving, and I got only two weeks of handover.

Then, basically… figure it out.

I found myself managing dozens of clients, and one particularly large one where I was essentially on site full time.

The small problem was that I didn’t yet have all the skills needed to do it.

VPNs, Linux blade servers with six nodes, a domain controller with dozens of clients, backups, Wi‑Fi networks, forklifts with connected tablets, Zebra printers, infrastructure and systems support.

And, while we were at it, applications I had to write PHP for.

In short: a proper mess. Especially for someone still finishing university.

But when you have a client in front of you and something isn’t working, you can’t say you haven’t studied that topic yet.

You have to understand the problem, study, try, fail, and eventually fix it.

I was also clearly underpaid relative to the responsibilities I’d been given.

Lunch breaks

At the end of the six months, the renewal was already ready.

They offered a small raise, but the responsibilities would have stayed essentially the same.

And yet I don’t think that was the real reason I decided to leave.

The thing that, more than anything, made me realise that path wasn’t mine was, paradoxically, the cafeteria lunch breaks.

Every day I looked around and saw people who had been living that same life for years.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with it.

I simply couldn’t see myself there.

I couldn’t imagine having the same lunch break, in the same setting, for the next five, ten or twenty years.

And I think that’s exactly where I understood something: I wanted to decide my own path.

I didn’t yet know exactly where it would take me. But I knew I wanted to be the one choosing the direction.

Where I didn’t want to stay

So at the end of those six months, instead of signing the renewal, I resigned.

I opened a VAT number and started working as a freelancer.

I didn’t have great certainties. But I had understood very clearly which life I didn’t want.

And sometimes knowing where you don’t want to go is already enough to start building your own path.