Careers aren't linear

DRAFT — replace with Matthias’s own words.

There’s a story we’re taught about careers: pick a lane early, compound in it for forty years, retire an expert. It’s a tidy story. I don’t think it’s true, and I’ve stopped pretending my own life fits it.

Mine has gone from computer vision for autonomous vehicles, to industrial machine vision, to co-founding a voice-AI company. Told one way, that’s a man who can’t sit still. Told honestly, it’s someone who kept following the same curiosity into whatever room it was most useful.

Reinvention is the normal case

I think the linear career is the historical exception, not the rule — a mid-twentieth-century artifact of large companies and long tenures. For builders and entrepreneurs especially, reinventing yourself every few years is the baseline, not a crisis.

The engine underneath a good career isn’t a job title. It’s a small set of questions you can’t stop asking. Mine has always been some version of how do we make machines understand the human world without lying about how much they actually understand? That question has worn at least three industry costumes. It’ll wear more.

You’re not starting over. You’re carrying the same spine into a room where fewer people have it.

What actually transfers

When you change fields, the surface knowledge depreciates fast. Nobody’s paying me today for my grasp of camera calibration. But the deep structure transfers almost completely:

• How to reason about uncertainty when the data is partial and the stakes are real.
• How to tell a load-bearing detail from a distraction.
• How to earn trust from people deciding whether to rely on your work.
• How to stay calm when the map runs out and you have to navigate by feel.

None of that is domain-specific. All of it took a decade to build. When people fear a pivot “wastes” their experience, they’re usually mismeasuring what their experience even was.

The part that isn’t a strategy

I should be honest that this isn’t only a clever framing. Some of it is just who I am — married, two kids, mid-thirties, and still constitutionally unable to leave an interesting problem alone. Faith, family, and a stubborn curiosity are the fixed points; the career is what moves around them.

That’s the quiet argument of this whole site, really. Not that you should engineer a nonlinear path for advantage — but that if your life already looks like a series of reinventions, you don’t owe anyone an apology for it. You might be doing it exactly right.