Before I knew the word. Before the degree. Before the campus gate — I was already reverse-engineering the world with my bare hands.
I was seven, maybe eight, and I had just cracked an app using GameGuardian. I didn’t know what I was doing had a name. I didn’t know it was called “reverse engineering.” I didn’t even know what engineering was. I just knew something deep and electric: things that look finished aren’t finished. They can be opened. Understood. Changed.
That feeling — not the cheat codes, not the free coins — that feeling of peeling back the surface of a system and seeing the wires underneath. That was it. That was the thing. That was what nobody else in the room was looking for, and I couldn’t stop.
“Engineering isn’t a decision you make at 17 on a form. It’s something you’ve been doing since before you had the word for it.”
The disease with no name
There’s a type of person who can’t walk past a broken fan without quietly clocking which part has failed. Who hears a strange noise from an engine and starts triangulating, not panicking. Who, at age 8, takes apart a mobile phone not to destroy it — but because the idea that nobody has told them what’s inside is genuinely intolerable.
That’s the disease. It doesn’t have an official diagnosis. The closest thing is engineering. And the degree is just the paper that retroactively names what you already were.
// age: 7–8. tools: GameGuardian, curiosity, zero fear
function understandWorld() {
while (thingExists) {
openIt();
breakIt();
fixItBetter();
}
}
// nobody taught this. it just ran.
What people get wrong about regret
Everyone has an uncle who sighs about wasted years in engineering. Every LinkedIn post about “escaping tech” gets 40,000 likes. Whole ecosystems exist to validate the idea that choosing this field was a mistake.
But here’s what those people are actually saying: they chose the label, not the obsession. They picked engineering because someone told them it paid well, or because it was safe, or because their parents wanted it. And they were right to leave — they were never there in the first place.
Write on Medium
I am not that. I was pulling motors apart before I could spell the word motor. The degree didn’t give me this. It just gave it a home.
“The regret isn’t about engineering. It’s about choosing a costume instead of a calling.”
What engineering actually is
Real engineering isn’t a job title or a salary bracket. It’s a specific and relentless relationship with reality. It means you look at every system — mechanical, digital, social, biological — and your brain involuntarily starts asking: why does this work? what breaks it? how would I build it differently?
It means you fix things that aren’t yours to fix. You optimize routes you didn’t need to take. You read documentation nobody asked you to read. You build tools that solve problems you invented by noticing the problems existed.
It means when something is wrong, you are constitutionally incapable of shrugging. The shrug has been patched out of your firmware.
What I know now that 8-year-old me didn’t
The thing that made me crack that app wasn’t curiosity in the general, motivational-poster sense. It was a specific intolerance for not knowing. An almost physical discomfort with opacity. Systems that hid their logic from me felt like a personal challenge — a dare.
I know now that this is exactly what good engineers feel, regardless of domain. It’s what makes someone at 2am still reading a kernel panic trace instead of sleeping. It’s what makes someone build a second tool when the first tool works fine, just because they saw a better way. It’s not discipline. It’s compulsion. Loving compulsion.
People will keep making the jokes. “Engineering is just endless suffering.” “Should’ve done finance.” Fine. Let them.
I was born with a debugger running in my head. I don’t know how to turn it off. I don’t want to.
“Some people chose engineering. Some people were engineering long before the choice.”
That’s the only version of this story I know how to tell. The true one.
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