Thank You, Every Time: What the Pyxel Team at ESA Taught Me That No Employer Ever Did

Every time I sent the Pyxel team something, they said thank you.

Not once at the end, as a formality. Every time. A fix, a new version of the tool I was building, an answer to a question: thank you. I want to write about that, because in all my years of working and applying for work, no employer ever thanked me for my work, and I didn't know how much I needed it until it happened.

This isn't a technical post. I've written about what I built for Pyxel before. This one is about how it felt to build it, and what it taught me.

How it started

Pyxel is an open-source detector simulation framework developed by a team at the European Space Agency. It's used by ESA, the European Southern Observatory and institutes around the world. I started the way anyone can start on an open-source project: I contributed on GitLab, and then I emailed the maintainer.

I expected a short reply, maybe. What I got was an invitation to meet the whole team online. I introduced myself, and then each of them introduced themselves to me.

That detail matters to me more than almost anything else in this story. It wasn't an interview, where one side asks the questions and the other side performs. It was a team meeting a new person and treating that person as someone worth knowing.

They were grateful from the very first conversation. I hadn't proven anything yet. They were simply glad someone wanted to help.

What working together looked like

I was building Pyxel Config Lab, a tool that helps people write and check Pyxel configurations without fighting the file format. The team wrote me extensive feedback on it. Not a quick "looks good", and not a list of everything wrong handed down from above. Careful, detailed notes from people who had clearly sat down with the tool and used it.

Good feedback is a form of care. It says: I took your work seriously enough to spend my time on it.

So I kept working. I sent the next version, read the next round of notes, and improved it again. Nobody told me the iterations were a waste of time. Iteration was the point. That's how good software gets made, and they knew it.

And every time, they thanked me.

I was included. I was part of their work, not a ticket to be closed. They were respectful to me as a person and as an engineer, and open to ideas that didn't start with them.

The tool shipped alongside the official Pyxel 2.14 release. It was later named in the team's peer-reviewed Pyxel 3.0 paper (Proc. SPIE 14157), which records that I led the development of Pyxel's new GUI. The maintainer also wrote me a reference, with a line in it I treasure:

"Doby Baxter joined the Pyxel project on his own initiative and quickly became a key contributor."

Those are the achievements, and I'm proud of them. But they aren't what I treasure most. What I treasure is how it felt along the way. To this day, it's the best collaboration I've ever had.

The other side

Here is the comparison, as plainly as I can put it.

• At Pyxel, I emailed one person and was invited to meet the whole team. In job applications, I mostly got automated rejections, or no reply at all, often before a person had read a word.
• At Pyxel, the team introduced themselves to me. In hiring, I was the only one expected to explain myself.
• At Pyxel, my work got detailed feedback and a thank you. From employers, it got silence.
• At Pyxel, iteration was welcome. With employers, anything beyond exactly what I'd been told to do wasn't seen as care or initiative. It was a problem.
• At Pyxel, I was included. Elsewhere, I was replaceable, and so was everyone around me.
• At Pyxel, I was valued for what I brought. Elsewhere, some employers were interested in my skills right up until they reached the part-time hours and adjustments I need. One role ended because adjustments that had been agreed were never put in place.

I could bring the same passion I brought to Pyxel to an employer, and it would be dismissed.

Same person. Same passion. Same standard of work. Two completely different outcomes. The difference was never me. It was whether the people on the other side were open-minded or closed-minded.

The opposite of competition

Corporate work taught me that work is a competition: for roles, for credit, for being seen as the one who did it.

The Pyxel team taught me the opposite. Respect. Mutual care. Collaboration in the real sense of the word, where everyone's work makes everyone else's better, and people say so out loud.

None of that cost them anything. Saying thank you is free. Introducing yourself is free. Reading someone's work carefully costs an hour. And it changed everything for me.

Why it's the reason I kept going

I've stopped applying for jobs. That decision is made, and I'm at peace with it.

But giving up on employment and giving up on engineering are two very different things, and the Pyxel team is the difference between them. Without them, every signal I'd received would have said the same thing: your work doesn't matter to anyone. With them, I have proof of the opposite. Good people exist. Open-minded people exist. People who will appreciate careful work, say so, and treat the person who made it with respect.

I don't believe that because I hope it. I believe it because I've lived it.

What I carry into my own work

That belief is what my business is built on. I now work for myself, doing reliability reviews and engineering for small businesses, and the clients I hope to work with are people like the Pyxel team: open, respectful, and glad when something is done with care.

It goes both ways. I try to work the way they worked with me. Thank people for their time. Give feedback that shows I actually read the thing. Explain, and never talk down. Treat someone's system, and someone's work, as theirs.

Thank you

So, to the Pyxel team at ESA: thank you. For the welcome, the feedback, the patience, and every single thank you. You didn't just help me build a tool. You showed me what working together is supposed to feel like, and you gave me a reason to keep going. I hope everyone gets to work with people like you at least once.