This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge: Echoes of Experience
"I don't know which box to put you in."
I've been hearing those words for thirty years.
And every single time, it lands like a slap.
The violence isn't in the words. The violence is in what the words actually mean.
It's not: which box could I put you in?
It's: you make me uncomfortable. So I won't hire you.
In a lot of companies, recruitment works like that old Eastern European joke: you give two agents a round peg and a square hole. Two solutions: enlarge the hole… or hit the peg harder.
Guess what the industry has been choosing?
It hits. Harder. Again and again.
Tonight I'm not going to tell you a story about resilience.
I'm going to show you the cost of refusing to fit the box.
Exhibit 1 — The Unlikely Internship
End of studies. 1989.
Everyone is chasing SSII firms, banks, impressive CVs.
Me? I choose a middle school. A library. An 8088.
I know perfectly well it won't lead to a job.
That's not the point.
I want human contact. Real problems. Everyday life.
At a software firm, I would have coded screens. Batch procedures. Efficient within my lane. Never responsible for the whole.
Here, I build a complete application. From scratch. With real users in front of me. Immediate feedback.
I learn what no one would have taught me elsewhere: how to think an entire system.
Not just my part of the ticket.
Exhibit 2 — The Printer
Architecture firm. 1993.
HP printer. Designed for PC and mainframe use. 132 columns, continuous paper feed. 36 switches on the back panel, combinable in non-linear ways.
It had never printed a single accent.
The firm called HP support.
And waited. For months.
Me? I call HP. I offer: "Do you want me to come to Grenoble to pick up the manual myself? I'm in Aveyron. 400 kilometres. I'm ready."
Three weeks later, the manual arrives. 300 pages. Pure English. ASCII only. Not a word about French. Not a word about single-sheet feeding.
I read all 300 pages. I understand the logic. I deduce. I test.
The firm prints in French. On A4. Perfectly.
An IT department would still be waiting for support today.
Exhibit 3 — The Cleaning Company
A cleaning company. A simple need: manage their activity, schedules, clients.
They're advised to go with Windows 3.1 + Office.
The hype of the moment. Everyone's doing it, so they should too.
Me? I look at the actual need.
OS/2. Lotus Symphony.
Twice as cheap. Twice as stable. Perfectly suited to what they actually do.
And the price difference? It funded a 486DX40 instead of an SX25. 16MB of RAM instead of 4. A 240MB hard drive.
The entire market is turning its back on these tools? So be it.
The need comes before the trend. And the saved budget goes into the machine.
An IT department would have ordered the Microsoft licences and called it modernisation.
I delivered a system that held up — on a machine that could actually run it.
Exhibit 4 — The SELECT COUNT(*)
Paris. 2010.
A project manager wants to catch me out in front of the team.
I write a SELECT COUNT(*).
He jumps on it. "We don't do SELECT *."
I explain. For MySQL, COUNT(*) is the most performant solution. He tests.
He concedes.
But the tension remains.
Because I contradicted him. In front of everyone. When he had been trying to humiliate me.
I wasn't the one with a problem.
He was the one who couldn't stand being wrong.
In these companies, they don't want people who think.
They want people who validate.
Exhibit 5 — The Open Space
In an open space, you don't model systems. You survive the noise.
You don't think. You manage interruptions.
The industry calls that collaboration.
I call it destroying the concentration of the people who need it to work.
I turned down assignments because of this.
A line I never crossed.
Exhibit 6 — Logic-immo
One exception.
Just one in five years.
Logic-immo. 2008.
Brought in for Zend Framework.
Left having designed and built an Oracle-to-MySQL data extraction system in PHP CLI.
Why?
Because someone had looked at what I could actually do.
And decided to give priority to the need.
Someone had read between the lines.
Rare. Worth mentioning.
In 2011, I was burned out.
In 2012, my daughter was born.
I left Paris.
Exhibit 7 — The Regional Directory
Back in the South-West.
A client. A monstrous project: local directory, classifieds, events section for every town and village, dedicated site for every business.
Over a hundred professional sites to generate and manage dynamically. Custom routing. Zend Framework. Smarty.
A standard agency wouldn't have lasted three months.
Not because of the project.
Because of the client.
Hypochondriac. Always wound up. Always in crisis mode. Unmanageable for anyone without patience.
I held on. Ten months. Solo. Architecture built from scratch.
To the point where I fantasised about a permanent contract.
Any one. Just to never have that kind of client again.
Exhibit 8 — The B2B Platform
A matchmaking platform for business conventions.
The existing application took ten minutes to load.
Ten minutes.
Server ten years past its prime. First-generation Symfony. Poorly designed PostgreSQL database. Non-relational data. Queries going in every direction.
Nobody had asked the question: why is it slow?
I asked the question.
Custom framework inspired by ZF, but lighter. MySQL. Data schema rebuilt from scratch. Processes rewritten from the ground up. Fluid, responsive, usable interface. And a proper server.
Under thirty seconds.
That's not magic.
That's what happens when you look at the problem before touching the code.
They fired me for incompetence the day after launch.
Five thousand visits. Every meeting scheduled. The platform handled everything.
I fix things. Then I get shown the door.
The labour court agreed. Six months' compensation.
Exhibit 9 — The Projects Nobody Asked For
Nobody commissioned these.
They come from an impulse. A conversation. A problem I noticed.
Dev.to ranks me in the top 7 of the week. I could say thanks and move on.
Instead I implement RFC 2324.
The HTTP protocol for controlling a coffee maker. A 1998 joke buried in the Internet standards. Implemented seriously. Raw asyncio TCP server. Per-pot locks. Compliant headers.
In the comments, @sylwia-lask asks when I'm going to implement a protocol for beer.
I run with it.
RFC 1516. The Hyper Text Beer Mug Control Protocol. Port 1414, a nod to Gdańsk.
The CV as a graph of relationships — because a profile like mine isn't linear. A timeline says nothing. A graph says everything.
AJC Bridge — write from WordPress, publish everywhere. Submitted to a challenge. Runner-up.
No ticket. No meeting. No box.
Just a problem, an impulse, and someone who gets on with it.
Exhibit 10 — The Handover and the Veto
I coach a young entrepreneur. WordPress, Divi, Plesk.
I set up his servers. I pass on what I know.
And one simple principle: never put all your eggs in one basket. Always keep external backups.
OVH burns down.
He manages 60 sites. He loses them — theoretically.
He calls me.
48 hours later, everything is back up on new servers.
It wasn't me who saved his sites.
It was advice given months earlier.
We keep a great relationship.
He's part of a BNI. He puts my name forward for a training assignment.
Veto.
Not standardised.
The system would rather go without someone who just saved 60 sites in under 48 hours.
Think about that for a moment.
Exhibit 11 — The Classroom Aide
I discovered this job over ten years ago.
My daughter's mother is a classroom aide for students with disabilities. She told me about it. I thought it was a job that made sense.
In 2021, a position opens near me. I jump at it.
The recruiter confirms in under five minutes. I barely have time to go down the stairs, step outside the building — he's already calling me back to come sign the contract.
For a while, it was exactly what I'd imagined. Students in difficulty. Concrete work. Visible results.
Some of the students I supported no longer need a classroom aide today.
That's the job.
Except the expectations have shifted.
Because there's no space in the specialist units. No space in the vocational streams. No space in the adapted classrooms.
So these students get placed in mainstream education. And a classroom aide gets put in front of them.
That's not educational support. That's the work of a specialist educator — paid twice as much, with the training and recognition that come with it.
I'm paid minimum wage. Half-time.
And some teachers have one request: shut up and stay in your lane.
The system does here exactly what it does everywhere else.
It puts the round peg in the square hole.
And when it doesn't fit, it hits harder.
The Mechanism
WeCoded talks about marginalised voices in tech.
Marginalised. One word. Dozens of realities.
It's not only about gender, skin colour, sexual orientation.
Racism, homophobia, the rejection of an atypical career path, the rejection of the wrong kind of degree — all of it belongs to the same family.
The family of refusing the other.
The family of human stupidity organised into a system.
The mechanism is always the same.
You don't fit in the box. So you don't exist. **And you won't.**
And that marginalisation hurts all the more because it makes no sense.
It can be justified — process, boxes, grids.
But every justification will itself be unjustifiable.
What I want you to take away is this:
The Verdict
In all of these stories, one constant.
I always solved the problem I was called in for.
Always.
And yet I remain "unclassifiable". Not employable. Not standardised. Not in the box.
So the real question — the one that stings — is simple.
Who's the problem?
Me — the one who solves the problems?
Or the system — the one that doesn't know what to do with me between fires?
For thirty years, the industry has chosen to hit the peg.
The peg is still round.
And the hole is still square.
Top comments (7)
The ones who couldn't be categorised are the only ones worth learning from.
The younger generation just hasn't figured that out yet. Some of them will.
I know I am.
Being unboxable forces you to see the whole system — because nobody ever handed you a lane to stay in.
But it also takes time. And life. The unboxable ones don't just think differently. They've lived differently. That's the part that can't be taught in a course or copied from a tutorial.
Some of the younger generation will get there. The ones who are already asking the uncomfortable questions probably already know.
Hey Pascal,
the question is more like: why is this (still) relevant to you?
Because it is irrational and unfair? Yes it is. So what?
You won't change people that don't want to change. It is as simple as that.
I know the language in my answer is quite hard, but as someone who was in exactly the same situation for a very long time, I can tell you this:
It is YOUR expectation that people see your qualities that disappoint and hurt you. Let go of the expectations, and life will be much more carefree and from time to time you'll be pleasantly surprised :)
All the best from Vienna,
Ben
Hey Ben, thanks for the kind words from Vienna.
I hear you — and I think the article may have read as frustration. It wasn't meant to.
I let go of that expectation a long time ago. I have no illusions about how the game is played, or who usually wins it. Sharks do fine. Competence is optional.
What stays with me isn't the lack of recognition. It's something else: the regret of not sharing. Not contributing. Being called in to fix things, then shown the door before anything can be transmitted.
That's not hurt. That's waste.
The article isn't a complaint. It's an observation. The peg is still round, the hole is still square — and I've stopped trying to fit. But I reserve the right to point at the hole.
All the best back,
Pascal
" But I reserve the right to point at the hole." - a noble endeavour! I have to remember that phrase.
Your answer expanded on what i felt before already.
I can feel the pain of seeing people going out of their way to ignore things that would only benefit them, just "because".
But hey, at least you did your thing and it was good, right?
Keep the faith :)
That phrase earned its place the hard way. Thirty years of evidence.
And yes — the work was good. That part I'm sure of.
wow