Into the unknown

In about 10 days from now, on October 1st, I will start working as a consultant for Arktekk. Arktekk is a small company of 8 (soon 9) senior consultants. During job changes like this, I tend to think about a lot of things, and there are plenty of emotions. I want to share some of them — both the thoughts and the emotions¹.

First, why Arktekk? The main reason is probably that I’ve come to know some of the people in Arktekk, and I thoroughly enjoy working with them. They are highly experienced and skilled, quite a bit nerdy, but they also have a good understanding of the human side of development. That is, how we need well-functioning teams and organizations to be successful.

I really like the Arktekk slogan: «Hva prøver du egentlig å løse?» — what are you actually trying to solve? In my career, both as a researcher and as a developer, I’ve often thought about this very question. I’ve personally dived deep into things just to realize later that my excellent solution was solving the wrong problem. And I have observed that a lot of people make this mistake. I’ve found that Arktekk are people who are not afraid to ask these questions.

Now, I need to admit that I am a little bit scared and worried about the coming months. This is multi-faceted, but the two most important factors are related to AI and competence.

On competence: I have a lot of experience working with software. But much of that experience is either informal (hobby projects) or tied to a very specific domain (research code). I have only formally worked as a developer for 4.5 years. And now I’m aiming to fill a role as a senior consultant among several people with 15-20+ years of experience. That’s intimidating! But it is also motivating. I find I have strengths and experiences from my research background that complement my lack of dev experience². And although I still have a lot to learn, I now have talented and experienced colleagues in Arktekk from whom I can learn.

And then there’s AI, which is changing how people are doing all sorts of things, including software development. It seems like AI enables us to build software at a much higher pace. We are already seeing that big companies are letting people go, and I believe it is harder to get a job as a junior these days. AI-assisted development may turn out to reduce the demand for consultants. So, perhaps I’m jumping into this career path at the worst possible time?

I still believe that part of the AI hype is just that: hype. We still need experienced people involved to ensure that we are building the right things with the right level of quality. For now, I believe we should consider AI to be a fancy and powerful new tool — but still, just a tool. Charity Majors at Honeycomb wrote about this in AI Norms & Values, Part 3 of 3: Things We Hold True, and about how it is important that there is still a clear human ownership of work. If we use AI without being careful, it will come at a cost of reduced quality and potentially very costly messes that need to be cleaned up later.

In short, I don’t think AI can replace the need for highly competent developers³. And I believe that businesses that end up relying too much on AI, too soon, will end up having hard problems to solve. Thus, I believe that there will be a demand for high-competence and skilled consultants. But I am still worried that it may be hard to get clients and that this journey does not go as well as I wish.

The unknown is scary. Even so, I have found I would rather risk regretting something I did than spend years regretting that I never tried. I may fail, spectacularly, which will be both humiliating and painful. But it may also end up working out just fine! And even if I fail, I will still come out with valuable experiences.

And then I’m also feeling gratitude. I’m very grateful to my current and soon-to-be former employer, ThermoPhys. ThermoPhys is a local start-up in Trondheim that originates from the research environments at NTNU and SINTEF. I started working for them as a fullstack developer in November last year, 2025. We’ve been building a modern cloud platform for modelling process and energy systems. Working with them has been my first experience working in a start-up, and it’s been a thrill to work in such a fast-moving and dynamic environment. I’m grateful for the trust they put in me when they hired me, and for the opportunity to work with such a talented group. I wish them all the best and I sincerely hope they will succeed in making the new state-of-the-art process simulation software!

Finally, I’m grateful to the people in Arktekk, that they have been willing to hire me. Arktekk are people whom I respect greatly as highly competent developers and consultants. That they have included me gives me a great sense of pride and happiness. I hope I will be able to show that this trust is well placed. And at the very least, I look forward to trying!