I finally became an engineer. So I guess it’s time to recap my year of being “unemployed.”
Turns out all you had to do was tell the assholes and degenerates in your life to fuck off — stop working with them, stop listening to them, stop trying to fix them, stop trying to prove anything to them. Wild concept, right? I’ve been “unemployed” for a year now, and I genuinely can’t explain what I do anymore, because I finally got full academic and technical freedom — and I’m running multiple projects that pay ten times better and bring a million times more satisfaction. I can now say with total confidence that the title “engineer” at any company or corporation is an even bigger joke than “director,” or some bald, sweaty middle manager’s title. The modern world barely understands what engineering even is anymore, and in Europe, people have mostly forgotten entirely.
The guy with “engineer” on a piece of paper, burning 80% of his time in corporate meetings.
In the first photo, that’s me — smiling, a guy with “engineer” printed on a piece of paper, doing glorified lab-tech busywork, spending 80% of his time in some godforsaken corporate meetings, before eventually getting walked out by security. Great experience, honestly — I’d do it again in a heartbeat, maybe with a bit more profanity this time, but unfortunately I’m an educated man, unlike the corporate biowaste that handled the escorting.
The entrepreneur. An actual, independent engineer — answering to no one’s opinion, least of all some shitty corporation’s.
In the second photo: an entrepreneur, a real and independent engineer, answering to nobody’s opinion, least of all some shitty corporation’s. I still remember the trembling knees of a spineless, useless manager who had to call in an even more useless HR director as backup — both of them apparently convinced that flexing their titles alone would make me cower, that some imagined authority would do the talking for them. The narcissism radiating off both of those clowns in that room was a thing of beauty. Still funny to think about, honestly — two whiny, frightened little men trying to intimidate someone who’s been through multiple emigrations, managed people for years, seen every flavor of bullshit and idiocy life has to offer, and frankly was eating losers like them for breakfast a decade before that. I just stopped finding it interesting, because I grew up. And you know what I did that same day, right after all of it? Took my wife out for wine, enjoyed life, fully aware that finding a job in Copenhagen right now is basically a fantasy and that things were about to change — but as always, only for the better, because anything new beats the old.
The funniest part of this whole experience is that nothing surprises me anymore. My tolerance for bullshit, after everything I’ve lived through, is tougher than goblin steel — and every new low just hardens the alloy further. Even funnier: I know exactly what everyone at that company is still doing right now. The same problems they had a year ago haven’t gone anywhere. The “alignment meetings” they keep running haven’t gone anywhere either. The wet dreams of paper-pushers about building a “new electronics factory in Denmark” so they can collect bigger bonuses and grander titles — still nowhere, still leading to nothing, still going to lead to nothing. Engineers are still suffering for peanuts without proper materials or equipment, still begging for a few measly tens of thousands of euros for a basic microscope or components for experiments.
Pathetic engineers somehow still feel the need to justify, to an even more pathetic manager — someone with zero financial accountability, someone who never hired them, someone who has a hundred percent chance of approving equipment that would obviously improve production quality, yet has no idea how it works, what it does, or even how the processes they’re supposedly “managing” actually function — why that piece of technical equipment is necessary at all. And somehow that same manager still finds the confidence to tell the person hired specifically for their expertise that they’re wrong. Meanwhile, they’re still trying to push some new AI module to market exactly as the AI hype is collapsing, when in a couple of years nobody — not even people in marketing — is going to care.
Every single stage of development, start to finish, runs on pure idiocracy. PCB designers who can’t ship a stable product, who don’t know what version control is, who store entire board designs in a zip file, who have never once in their lives set foot on an actual production floor. Mechanical engineers who have never once watched a real assembly happen, who have no idea how it’s actually done. And meanwhile, at the company Christmas party, you’re standing in a room with 4,000 people, of whom maybe 100 have ever physically touched the product — hardware or software — and the rest are just… wallpaper. I genuinely don’t know who they are. I think I’m done playing this circus for good.
I’ve never seen idiocracy at the level I saw at Demant — an entire company balanced on two rotting factories. One in Poland, where people walk in off the street in their outdoor shoes straight onto a microelectronics production floor, without even access to a decent cafeteria — looks worse, frankly, than some places I’ve seen in Russia. The other, a half-collapsed factory in Denmark that exists purely so shareholders can keep saying “Made in Denmark.” Every key process is run by boomers who don’t understand technology from ten years ago, let alone computerization, automation — never mind computer vision or AI. Workers on the floor in Denmark get paid peanuts while managers in Rolexes stroll past them. Your factory looks like a literal dump, and the answer is always “we have no space,” meanwhile your headquarters is the size of a town square in Copenhagen. This is hypocrisy and idiocracy in their purest, most undiluted form.
Honestly, I wouldn’t want to have seen any of this from the inside, let alone have any part in the future of a company that sells a product worth maybe 100 euros for 10,000 euros, riding insurance system scams and feeding an even bigger machine of idiocracy in the US. Fortunately, the fate of these people and everything around them looks a lot like Novo’s — a crisis hits, and they get tossed out like garbage, which was also pretty funny to watch: a bunch of “management of management” types wandering the Copenhagen job market, hat in hand, begging for work.
Every feeling this whole experience leaves me with is deep disgust. Unfortunately, thanks to the current political climate, the global situation, and Denmark’s repulsive political system, this episode cost me and my family a significant amount of money. But don’t worry — I hold grudges, and I always collect my debts. All I can observe right now is that Europe has made its choice, and unfortunately it’s a choice of total decline and gerontocracy. I, for one, am done paying — through my own self-development, my education, my work — to wipe the asses of German or Danish pensioners. And honestly, from what I can tell, they don’t need it either, because most of them have already lost their damn minds.
And here’s where I am now
Over 15,000 people follow what I build across platforms. My YouTube channel keeps growing. I’m designing and manufacturing unique equipment for analog photography — real hardware, solving real problems for a niche that corporate engineering departments wouldn’t even bother looking at, because there’s no quarterly bonus in it for some VP. No alignment meetings. No manager who’s never touched the product telling me I’m wrong about my own field. No begging for a microscope from someone who doesn’t know what a microscope does. Just me, building things people actually want, on my own terms, funded by people who actually believe in what I’m making. And this is just the beginning.
The whole takeaway from all of this: build your own projects, and invest your time only in yourself, your skills, and your own processes. Never learn some company’s internal corporate garbage, especially not their internal software. Never work for peanuts, especially not full-time. Never put yourself in a position of dependency on degenerates. Never let anyone chip away at your dignity, let alone your professionalism — and always stand up for yourself and what you believe in, even if it means telling someone to go fuck themselves, or worse.
All I can say is: I’m grateful for the 15K+ people who follow this journey, the people who support me, the projects that pay my bills, the friends and connections that let me do what I actually want to do, and the life experience that keeps me from walking into another situation like this one — even though sometimes “you just want to go back into the madhouse for old times’ sake.” Thank you to everyone I met this year — the people I worked with, the artists, the entrepreneurs, and the creators who gave me inspiration. It was a brutally hard year, both financially and emotionally. So sometimes it really is better to take One Step Back, Two Steps Forward — instead of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.