Your Life After Tech
After decades of building a tech career, author Debbie Levitt is one of many people with questions, anxieties, and doubts. As a mentor and coach, the employed and unemployed often ask her, “What happened to tech jobs?” and “What will I do next?”
In each episode, we'll meet someone who has left tech, is leaving tech, is adding non-tech work to a tech career, or is reinventing themselves with entrepreneurial adventures. You don't have to leave tech to join our multiverse!
You are the phoenix. It's never too early to plan what you'll do when you're done with tech… or tech is done with you... or you want to add non-tech work to a tech career.
Your Life After Tech is a podcast from the LifeAfterTech.info multiverse. Check out our "Life After Tech" book (with 18 actionable exercises), Discord community, coaching, and more. Use the "Phoenix Flight Plan" to get grounded, plan, rise, and soar.
Catch the video version of the podcast on YouTube https://lat.link/yt-podcast
Your Life After Tech
Ep 010: Ricardo Brito - From Service Design to In Service to Others
Ricardo Brito shares his transformative journey from tech burnout to becoming a solopreneur and career coach. He offers insights for individuals considering career transitions, warning against waiting until burnout or layoffs to take action.
• Ricardo’s background transitioning from graphic design to UX design
• The importance of following curiosity and exploring new paths
• Proactive planning to avoid financial insecurity during career changes
• Warnings against chasing “golden handcuffs” and unfulfilling roles
• Launch of Ricardo’s program, "Solo Business Co-Pilot"
• Importance of personalizing career development strategies
Find him at RicardoBrito.me
Welcome to the your Life After Tech podcast. This is episode number 10. I'm Debbie Levitt. Don't forget to check out our lifeaftertech. info multiverse, including our book, discord, community coaching and more, because you might be done with tech, tech might be done with you, or you're thinking about adding non-tech work to your tech career. Today's guest is Ricardo Brito R-I-C-A-R-D-O-B-R-I-T-O from ricardobrito. me. We'll be talking about his journey from being a service designer and UX designer to becoming a career and work coach, mentor and advisor. Let's get to know Ricardo.
Ricardo:Hi Debbie, hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me here, looking forward to our conversation today. Big fan of your book. A lot of, a lot of good stuff there. Um, yeah, I grew up in the family business. I never wanted to have a business, so I ended up, like you know, having a graphic design and branding career, and then I moved to germany and I had to become an intern again because I couldn't find a job and I saw that maybe graphic design and branding was kind of dying. So I become an intern in UX. That opened a new career of 12 years in tech that culminated in a burnout and that led me to actually now doing the thing that I never wanted to do, which is owning my own business.
Ricardo:Clap, clap, clap so here we are and I've been helping people finding what their next step in their careers. But now I'm focusing on helping people to actually become first-time solopreneurs, because that has been a segue of my career work. People come to the conclusion it's time to open my own thing.
Debbie:Yeah, that's definitely common. So you talked a little bit about the branding and the UX. What types of tech roles did you have?
Ricardo:I started really from the bottom right. The first job I had was exporting assets in different dimensions for the different apps of Android and iOS, so that's how I started. But then I move on to UX the more traditional UX, and with that, more strategic, and at Futurize I started to become a lot more focused on service design, especially focused on IoT, leading design teams and leading product teams, and through this process I was doing a lot of leadership work, but also project work. And then I moved to Doodle, where I was building the design chapter from scratch and after two years, because I was doing a lot of organizational work and people development, I became of what was called an innovation lead, where I was doing more, much more work with the C-level and decision making and organizational development and, yeah, and everything in between, I did a lot of product management, project management. We know we don't do that. One thing only right, we all do a lot of things that's what I find.
Debbie:It's the multi-specialist, the multi-corn.
Ricardo:I love that multi-corn.
Debbie:So you talked about going through an unfortunate burnout. Is that when you started thinking about shifting away from traditional tech jobs?
Ricardo:No, it started way before, but I think I took too long to come to the realization and I think it took me too long also to realize what is my exit plan. I think when I moved from Futurized to Doodle, I was already a bit disillusioned with tech at that point, like how tech was being used or tech was being you know. The direction of the whole industry was quite exciting at the beginning for me, but then it became quite hypocrite and quite cognitive dissonance and that started to bother me. That's why I also went in-house to say well, in-house I can have a lot more focus on the direct team and less so much on the outside world, which brings another meaning to my work. But also working in-house and I also had some, some challenges.
Ricardo:During this period a lot of things culminated, including also a pandemic that really pushed hard to. Then it was the final kick in the butt to okay, you really need to seriously think about getting out. So it started three years before I burned out. Ah, okay. So a bit of a slow motion process there. Yeah, slow burning, or you can say very hardcore denial, oh gosh, yikes.
Debbie:And so, through this multi-year process and the unfortunate burnout, how did you choose the path that you've ended up on?
Ricardo:Totally by chance and accident. In a sense, like during this burnout, during these eight months was the first time that I had to think about what do I want to do and where do I go from here, and I had no answer to think about. What do I want to do and where do I go from here? And I had no answer. And I was so focused on my design career and tech career that I kind of alienated everything else. And then, on top of it, there was the topic of the golden handcuffs, which plays a big role. And, yeah, during this period I tried many different things.
Ricardo:Right when I was in C-Cliff, I tried, you know, should I have a restaurant? And I started to cook some sort of you know meatballs and sell it to friends to see the whole process of you know running a whole restaurant, learning a lot about you know food, hygiene and all of that. I experimented with a lot of different things, everything but the laptop, everything but tech. And at a certain point my psychologist said maybe you should go to coaching. I think at this point therapy can go so far. And I said I don't need anybody to scream at me now I was just yeah, but that's not coaching, because that was my thinking.
Ricardo:Coaching is like the sports coach, right, and I went to coaching and I realized I had a good coach and I? Coaching is like the sports coach, right. And I went to coaching and I realized I had a good coach and I realized wait a second, this is the part of the work that I love to do. Although I was working in this deliver stuff and build stuff what I like to do was more the people development, solving the crisis and all of that and then I realized I could maybe explore coaching as a curiosity and I started to study coaching, took some certifications on the side and I realized that's something I want to do. I went back to my job. I was about to be promoted as a director. I said no, I want to be demoted. So I became like an innovation lead and an IC so focus on my own thing, produced four days a week, and slowly, slowly and steady, started to figure out my business on the side.
Debbie:Wow, and can I ask which certifications you got?
Ricardo:Yeah, the ICF, and also I took the Anima's transformational coaching school.
Debbie:Okay, cool. Icf level one.
Ricardo:Yep on the way.
Debbie:Yeah, that's what I'm working on. Yeah, awesome Indeed. So, since you've gone through the book my Life After Techbook, this question may sound a little familiar, but thinking about shifting into coaching, how would you say that this work matches some of your core personal qualities?
Ricardo:Yeah, it's always a tough question. I care and I think I care and I'm and it's important to me to do work that I'm involved in and I can have an impact on, and I think this 101 work is very important to me and I think it matches that part of the personality, the part that I can make sense of so many different things and bringing sense to chaos. It's something that I also, you know, bring and is quite helpful in the coaching space. I don't know, one can talk about empathy and all of those things, but yeah, exactly, Hashtag empathy.
Debbie:Tell us more about your new coaching business.
Ricardo:So I have been helping in the last three years, helping people in different ways, right, people who are like, oh okay, I'm not so happy in my job, but I don't want to make a decision yet, so I just want to start exploring. And I was facilitating this process of exploration of what could be next. Then I was working with people who wanted to do some sort of transition and some sort of change in their careers and figure out what that change was about and making that change happen. And I was doing a lot, also developed a lot around career storytelling and how to position yourself and how to make sense of your career stories. But during these three years I realized for a lot of us especially if you are mid-careers, like between mid-30s to mid-40s you have been working a lot in tech, you already are up to here.
Ricardo:A lot of us realize, hey, the wish list I have for my job is way too long. No job will ever get me that. So the closest I'm going to get to that is having my own business. And I've been supporting people having their own businesses and envisioning them and trying to bring them to reality. So now my shift is going to from leaving that part of career or career what is your next career? Step behind and figuring out how to move forward and more towards going the direction of helping people to become first-time solopreneurs. Also because after three years of building a successful business, I can also confidently know how to help others in doing that. Joining the the all my knowledge I had before the business and strategy and design and product development. Now, with this experience, I also know what's there. So there's where my passion is, where everything comes together.
Debbie:Now, let's put it that way yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thinking back on the last handful of years, is there anything that you think was a mistake or something you regret?
Ricardo:well, while I was employed, I regretted to to enter in denial for so long and to not have taken action. I should have taken action way before. I think I waited too long and the pain to be too big to take action, which put me in me not in a favorable position to make a change in my life. So that's one thing I regret. The second thing I regret as a business owner was bootstrapping too much. In the first year I tried to bootstrap so much and tried to save so much money by not seeking the help I needed and figuring out by myself that I could have been much further if I would have invested right from the start. So I think I also regret to have bootstrapped so much and that's something that for new people who are entering this, is very easy to enter in this bootstrap mode. But there is healthy bootstrap and there is bootstrap that will set you back interesting, interesting.
Ricardo:It'd be interesting to hear more about that, but chances are we have to be your coaching client to hear more about that unless you have a book coming out or something I do have a newsletter where I talk a lot about these things and I make use of my arts degrees where I can make nice cartoons and at least can make you laugh and hopefully.
Debbie:I want to back up a little bit to what you were talking about, which was the not going into it soon enough. And then, by the time you're trying to go into it, your energy might be zapped or you might not have the money available. And I feel like I'm hearing that more and more from just people around me the people on LinkedIn or the people in my online community, where they feel like, oh, I don't have to think about career changing or starting a business now, because I'll worry about that when I get laid off or I'll worry about that when I go a year without a job. What would you like to say to some of those people, if anything?
Ricardo:Don't do that. That's the first thing. Sorry, straight up, don't do that. What saved me, for example? I was working on my business plan for a year while I wasn't employed. When the moment came, I was ready to hit the ground. I mean, there was a lot of things to figure out, but speed is of essence. And then, second, if you are waiting for your to be laid off, you need to start make money very soon. You're going to make a lot of more compromises. You have an opportunity to build your own business and to build the thing you want. Then don't depend on it right away, because otherwise you're going to make a lot of compromises. And don't wait to be burned out. That's the last time. It takes so much blood, sweat and tears to build a business. I'm working a lot more than before and it takes time. You cannot do that burned out, and I think people wait too long for that and I don't.
Ricardo:I I think, even if you don't want to build a business, have a plan b, because sooner or later your job is not going to be there. Comfort lasts so long. So I I make sure you're surprised by how people are still and sorry if this sounds a bit arrogant, but I'm also a bit surprised that how people are still believing that everything is going to be okay after three years of layoff, and I was like I don't understand how you don't read the news. I'm sorry, like, start thinking about a business plan, start thinking about your plan b. It doesn't need to be a business plan. Do you have a? But start thinking about the plan b. It's essential nowadays's a must, and we have the best capabilities, especially designers and people in tech, like product and so on. You need to have so much knowledge business strategy, design, whatnot that many other jobs don't have these transferable skills, if you want to say that, or using in your own business.
Ricardo:I mean, you mentioned that in your book and I love that. Right, it's. Yeah, don't wait for the pain to be too big, I think. Just to finish on this thought, I think that is. I compare it with medicine. It's you can either cure it or you can prevent it, and the cure is going to leave scars, is going to be a lot more complicated, is going to take a long time, and if you prevent it, you know, I think you are in a much better position.
Debbie:Yeah, so fantastically put, and thank you for echoing some of the things that are in my head. I feel the same way. I see the desperation from people. I see how burned out they are. I see how much they are searching for all kinds of different things, and then someone will post on LinkedIn hey, the job market is getting better. Things are really turning around, and I see no evidence of that. I don't feel hopeful about that. I don't feel hopeful that AI is not going to continue to reduce or take more jobs, and I guess I'm happy to hear someone else saying they see the same thing. Not because I need the validation, but because it felt a little lonely out there.
Ricardo:Yeah, but yeah, and I'm glad we can have this conversation, because I think that was also one of the problems that frustrated me in tech, which is we cannot have honest conversations. It's not pc, it doesn't sound good or you are too negative, it's just can we talk about the problems? Can we talk about the actual problems that we are facing? These things of tech, of just look at the positives, don't, you know, always be improving? Ah, this is, it's so toxic at a certain point, it's so, it's, it's it, you know. So I'm glad that we can have these conversations, because things are not getting better. If they are getting better, they are not getting to the point we want, or we wanted or we were before. I mean, you mentioned also that in your book you are afraid of not making so much money. How much money are you making now? Compared to five years ago, you got the cut as well.
Ricardo:And your boss is worse and your work life is worse. So yeah, even the golden handcuffs starts to not be a good excuse, to be fair.
Debbie:Yeah, and they're not even golden handcuffs. I think that maybe the definition of that changed over time, because it used to be a giant amount of money that that companies gave, usually leadership, to avoid losing that leader when they got the feeling that leader was trying to go. And so I think with us it's like golden handcuffs. I see that word being used by you and some other people and my thought was like no, I think it's more like oh my God, the job offers money. Well, maybe I should stay, but, as I mentioned in the book, go ahead and stay for the money if you want, as long as you're not being abused Like this doesn't have to be your reason for living your life purpose.
Ricardo:That's true and I love that point Right. I love the point that also make. I agree with you on the Ikigai part. I think we ask too much from our jobs. We ask too much from the money. The nice boss is the nice culture. It needs to be good for the world and it's this is bound for failure. Also, we have this problem.
Ricardo:I talk with so many other I'm not sure if I guess you do as well, because otherwise you would not write this but I deal with so many other people outside of tech right, and I all we are a bunch of fanatics in tech in this. I'm sorry, like our life revolves so much about this that sometimes it's unhealthy. It makes us us making unhealthy choices for us as people. So I think also getting a bit of distance of the work we do and and and understand what is the place of the job, it's so important and we can learn from so many other industries of people like do their job, they're happy about it, cash in, move on, but not in tech. You cannot even, you are not even allowed to say that right.
Debbie:Yeah, it's, it's super stigma universe right now and I'm watching people. They're struggling even more. I think the mental health is getting worse, the burnout's getting worse because people go on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is full of toxic positivity and people acting like oh, you haven't found a job in 18 months, stay positive, that next job could be right around the corner.
Ricardo:Sure Jazz hands. Yeah, it's all on you, right? It's all on you Just a question of mindset.
Debbie:Right, exactly, please improve your mindset. That must be it. Oh my gosh, I could just talk to you forever, but I'm going to try to focus back on our usual questions. Looking back at my usual questions, our listeners might be considering leaving tech or adding non-tech work to what they're already doing. What advice would you give them?
Ricardo:Don't be too rash on leaving tech. I think always use the position of power that you have. If you have a job, if you have an income, great, use it. But use it now, intentionally. Now the job. It's about, I don't know, figuring something out in my life, figuring my next step, I think, practical steps that people can take. Can you negotiate less responsibilities? Can you accept the pay cut? I think that's always, you know, um good, to create space and time.
Ricardo:Regarding the, the, the non-tech, the non-tech, uh, jobs. I've started to, to, to I'm not sure if it's a trend already, but I start to see some, some signals which is people leaving tech for handy jobs. Is that how you do it? Like? You know, carpentry and so on. Because, to be fair, if, at least in germany, if I look how much a carpenter makes or a plumber, they make more than a lead designer and they have a less stressful life and they have people knocking on their doors a lot of people leaving tech. They want to do stuff with their hands. You know, I think that old industry it's waiting for people that want to learn the craft, and here you cannot bullshit it, by the way, nobody wants, you know, to prototype their pipes. But if you bring the knowledge of also how to build a business, you can actually create something really cool there. So I think that's something that I've been seeing some people going from tech in that direction. Okay, but I diverge, sorry no, that was great.
Debbie:That our first, uh, so I your episode 9 or 10, I can't remember. But episode 1 was a guy who left 20-ish years in design and UX and is now a handyman and doing home renovations.
Ricardo:There you go.
Debbie:So this is not a wild story. I have two left hands. Oh.
Ricardo:I have two left hands so I will never be able to do that. I will probably unprototype your pipes.
Debbie:Okay, you're fired. Before you're hired, any other advice you?
Ricardo:would want to give listeners. Look, don't wait too long. Protect yourself and be and be smart about it. I think being part of a union or knowing your rights as workers, even even as white-collar workers it's crucial. Like it or not, this is the way we live in. Know your rights, get support on that. You want to move forward, you want to figure out what's next. Don't wait too long to be burned out or to be laid off to actually finally take action. To be burned out to or to be laid off to actually finally take action, really make your choices from a place of power and autonomy and start thinking soon enough.
Debbie:Yeah, it's, you're like me with a beard. Yes, like yes, yes, yes, times 10. Yes, times 10. So people who might be interested in your coaching, or? I hear you have a program you'll be starting soon. How can people find you, follow you, get in touch with you.
Ricardo:Yeah, so I'm very active on LinkedIn. You can find me on Instagram if that's your jam. I have a newsletter called Burning Thoughts comes out every second week to talk about all of these issues that we've been talking. And yes, I do have a new program coming up. It's the Solo Business Co-Pilot. It's to support people that are transitioning to solopreneur, even if they have a job, trying to think about what their side has to be, or creating a plan B, or actually starting building it. Where us to be, or creating a plan B, or actually starting building it, where I'm not just a coach. I'm a coach, I'm a mentor, I'm a strategy. I do the work with you, I sit down. This is not just advice from the sidelines. I'm like, no, I sit down, do the nitty gritty with you. And yeah, that's what I'm launching this month and looking forward to to be working on this.
Debbie:Yes, wonderful, what a great idea. This is all stuff after my heart, so I love it and just wish you endless success. And is the for people who aren't looking at the screen? Is the URL on the screen correct? It's your nameme.
Ricardo:Yes, I mean it's very narcissistic, but it was the cheapest one. It was the cheapest one I found. At that point Everything else was like ridiculously expensive or made no sense. And then totally fine.
Debbie:You're talking to someone who just bought lifeaftertechinfo because of what the cost of lifeaftertechcom was. So I'm I'm all for the big top level domains there we go great so everybody find Ricardo on LinkedIn or at ricardobritome fantastic, I always end up saying that in Italian somebody stop me no, that's lovely. Thank you so much for having me yeah, thanks for coming and hope to catch you again soon. Happy new year. Happy new year. Yeah, thanks for coming and hope to catch you again soon. Happy New Year.
Ricardo:Happy New Year.
