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 this question.

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 I now have talented and experienced colleagues at Arktekk to help close my remaining knowledge gaps.

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 something I didn’t. I may fail, spectacularly, which will be both humiliating and painful. But it may also work out just fine! And even if I fail, I’ll still come away with valuable experience.

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!