I started in code and left it for craft. Everyone said that was a waste of a degree.
Two computer science degrees, then a masters in graphic design, which my family took roughly as well as you'd expect. It turned out to be the whole point. I now design software for the people who write the code I gave up writing — integration platforms, API tooling, AI agents that build enterprise workflows out of a sentence.
Three places shaped how I think. A design consultancy taught me speed, and that a beautiful idea you can't explain in one meeting is a dead one. A design system taught me the harder half of the job: making something good is easy compared with getting anyone to use it. And agentic AI taught me that the most important decision in the room is usually what the machine isn't allowed to do on its own.
What I like is the boring, load-bearing stuff. The error state nobody demos. The dialog that opens instead of the chat that guesses. The one sentence in a guideline that stops forty designers drifting apart. Enterprise software is where design gets to matter without getting to show off, and I've never wanted to work anywhere else.