After more than seven years, I’ve left Future.
I want to look back before I look forward, because those years turned out to be some of the most formative of my life - not just my career.
To take the job in the first place, I moved several counties away from my friends and family, to one of the most expensive cities in the UK, with no savings to fall back on if it all went wrong. On paper it was a reckless thing to do. I did it anyway. It was a risk, and it’s one I’m so glad I took, because almost everything good that’s happened to me since traces back to it.
Future treated me well from the very first day. I joined in 2019 as a mid-level developer, and my starting salary came in £5,000 above what I’d asked for - which rather set the tone for what followed. By the time I left, I’d been promoted through senior and tech lead roles several times over, and never once felt my effort went unnoticed.
Titles can come from any job, though. The moments I’ve had at Future are what make it worth it the most.
One of my fondest is a Black Friday - a big deal for ecommerce in publishing - sat in an increasingly quiet office as midnight approached, shipping an urgent release with a handful of colleagues we’d pulled together that day. Late-night deploys were never a normal thing, and this was the only one I can remember like this. From the outside it’s exactly the kind of evening you’d raise an eyebrow at, but I remember it with a smile. Nobody was made to be there. Everyone stayed. The CTO was in the office too, taking food orders and making sure we were all comfortable while we worked.
Late nights aren’t something to romanticise, and they shouldn’t be anyone’s normal. But when the exceptional did happen, the people made it good. That’s the part you can’t fake.
I got to do work I’m genuinely proud of, too. Some of it was glamorous - launching new sites, shipping new products, having my work seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world. But what I value most is the unglamorous kind that quietly makes everything better: modernising creaking legacy codebases, adding support for a dozen languages, improving accessibility, overhauling CI pipelines and local development setups. The work most users never noticed.
Engineering impact is often inversely proportional to visibility. The launch gets an announcement; the accessibility fix or the faster build never does. But those quiet improvements accumulate - they determine whether a product is pleasant to use, whether a system is safe to change, and whether the people maintaining it end each day energised or drained.
And I got to push for things well beyond my own desk - hack days, internal tech talks, developer satisfaction surveys so I could find out what to improve next, better tooling so everyone’s day-to-day was just a little nicer. They let me care about more than my own code, and that meant the world to me.
As Future grew and acquired other businesses (about 15 acquisitions in my time there alone!), my team grew with it. Over time I took ownership of three acquired projects, each with its own developers, history and quirks to get my head around - while I was still responsible for the flagship project I was initially hired to work on. It was a lot. It was also exactly the kind of challenge I thrived in.
Not every stretch was easy, though. There were difficult projects, tiring periods, and reorganisations that changed things in ways I didn’t always welcome. It’s enough time for a workplace to become something quite different from the place you first walked into - and for you to become someone different too.
I didn’t leave because Future had become a bad place to work - it hadn’t. I left because staying had become comfortable, and I wanted to take the kind of risk that brought me there in the first place, focussing my skills and energy on new things.
But what I’m really leaving behind isn’t a company or projects. It’s people - colleagues and a direct team I’ve grown to know and love over the years, people who I’ve known for the majority of my adult life, people who I’ll miss far more than any product or process ever could.
One co-worker once ran a Dungeons & Dragons one-shot in the office after hours. I’d never played before, but I loved it. Loved it enough to go and find a group of my own the next day so I could play more often - and it’s through that in which I’ve made most of my friends today, and even through that group that I met the woman who is now my wife.
One person, one after-hours game, and a big part of the shape of my life outside work traces back to it.
I didn’t just build a career at Future. I found friends. I built a life.
Future is my past now. But so much of my present - the work I’m proud of, the people I love, even the person I married - I owe to walking through its doors and taking that risk all those years ago.
