I was a Software Engineer at the Intelligent Retail Lab by Walmart, working on computer vision systems for self-checkout. My role focused on deploying models across edge devices and ensuring that performance in the real world matched what we saw in our simulations. I collaborated closely with machine learning engineers and data scientists to keep our object detection and tracking models reproducible and accurate.
But the disconnect I sometimes felt in my work mirrored what I experienced outside the office.
I lived in Bentonville, Arkansas: a town curated and controlled by the largest retailer in the world. It was a manufactured environment. People from across the country were relocated there, thrown into a cultural melting pot that never really fused. It felt disconnected. So did I.
The work was technical, challenging, and at times exciting. But eventually, something shifted. In a one-on-one, my manager asked me a simple question: "What's your 'why' for doing this work?"
I didn't have an answer.
Not a convincing one, at least. I wasn't building anything that felt meaningful to me anymore. The code worked. The models deployed. But I had no reason to care. I lost motivation, not because I couldn't do the work, but because the work didn't speak to anything I believed in.
The tech industry isn't what it used to be. Layoffs have become routine. Teams shrink, but the workload doesn't. The industry talks about efficiency, but really it's just trying to do more with fewer humans.
Junior engineers are being squeezed out, their roles replaced by offshoring or code assistants. There's this dangerous belief that AI can just replace early-career developers. But when you remove the backbone, you stunt the future of innovation. And let's be honest: a lot of these decisions are about cutting costs, not building better products, not helping people, and certainly not cultivating long-term talent.
I grew tired of pretending that this was normal. That this was okay. For a long time, I forgot why I even got into tech.
But the truth is, I've always been driven by science, health, and human impact. I was born with a rare genetic disease. Somewhere along the way, I knew I wanted to work on problems that mattered, problems that could help people like me.
So I made the hard choice: I walked away.
I'm returning to my roots in biotech and research, to work on systems that prioritize health, equity, and real-world impact over profits and quarterly OKRs. My background has always been grounded in using computation to solve biological problems, and I'm ready to be part of that mission again. I'm fortunate to be joining the National Institutes of Health as a postbac research fellow, where I'll be applying machine learning to study fold-switching proteins.
If you're feeling the same tension between what you do and why you do it. I hope this gives you permission to ask hard questions, too. Sometimes quitting isn't failure. Sometimes it's the first step toward building a life that actually makes sense.