Why I became a career coach
Most people become coaches because they want to help people. I became one because I wanted to improve IT companies from the bottom up.
I'd been in IT since 2014. QA → backend → team lead. I moved fast. Each promotion was, on paper, the right one. By 2022 I was leading a cross-functional team of ten engineers in Berlin, sitting through days full of OKR syncs, and explaining to people I genuinely cared about that things were under control when they weren't.
The strange part isn't that I burnt out. The strange part is how long it took me to admit it. For about a year I rotated through the usual hypotheses – maybe it's the project, maybe it's the team, maybe I'm just bad at this kind of management – and optimised around each one. More ownership. Different scope. Even a company-paid coach.
The coach was supposed to help me get better at my role. It worked, but not quite in the direction the company had in mind. Sessions kept circling back to the same observation: the parts of my week that drained me weren't "managing engineers". They were the parts where I was performing a role I had never aligned with. And the parts that gave me energy – running brainstorms so quieter colleagues got heard, sitting with someone trying to figure out their next move, spending an hour explaining a system to someone outside engineering who'd been told to "just figure it out" – I'd been treating as side quests.
It took me almost another year to act on it. The honest reasons it took so long: money, identity, and fear of becoming "the woman who quit IT to become a coach", which is its own awkward archetype.
The trigger, when it came, wasn't motivational. A colleague left tech after his father died, realising it can get too late too soon, and I caught myself wishing I also had a reason that clear. Not a month later, my own father died. I took it as a sign.
I left in 2023.
What I do now
I coach senior engineers and experienced tech people who are stuck somewhere familiar to me: the gap between "my career looks fine" and "not for me."
Sometimes that gap is direction – what's next, what's actually possible, where to stop pretending and start allowing yourself to dream. Sometimes it's positioning, CVs, LinkedIn, interviews. Sometimes it's having an honest conversation with someone who understands and doesn't judge but asks instead:
"Wait. What is the problem we are actually trying to solve here?"
It's introspective work. But also logical, structured, practical – the way most engineers prefer to think.
I won't tell you what your next step should be. I won't try to motivate you. I'll ask challenging questions and notice patterns you've stopped seeing. In the meanwhile we'll fill a table or two. Maybe create a database.
Credentials
- 10+ years in IT: QA → backend → team lead → now a founder.
- Hiring manager and interviewer for QA, backend, frontend, product, and management roles. Now supporting startups as a technical interviewer.
- Accredited diploma in transformative coaching with Animas Centre for Coaching (UK).
- 400+ coaching hours with private and government-funded (AVGS) clients.
What clients say
