The tour had barely begun, I’d been on the path for about two hours, winding through forest, pasture, and hills on a route around the Mürtschenstock.

A light, lukewarm breeze drifted through the air, yet the weather was already drawing the first beads of sweat onto my forehead. After a while, the last inhabited houses lay behind me and slowly things began to get serious.

“Resistance, resistance…”

These words wouldn’t leave my head, and so I repeated them in a quiet murmur. The path grew more challenging, I felt the resistance of this landscape, reluctant to let me come closer today. I reached for my water bottle again and again to refuel.

I had chosen this route myself, and not for the first time. It offers variety, beautiful views all around, I can test my fitness, constantly improve myself. To enjoy the highest point of this route at the halfway mark. To lose myself in the landscape, to be one with it for a few hours. And afterwards to descend back into the valley filled with impressions. To tackle my next professional challenges with a fresh mind.

“Resistance, resistance…” - still these words in my head?

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During this tour, I had a grotesque vision. What if I weren’t climbing the mountain voluntarily? What if I were part of a group, led by an obsessed mountain guide, up to a summit from which no path leads back down? Where no person will ever make it down alive.

And from the beginning, it would be clear to many participants that the path is wrong. Since they would have far more experience than the guide himself. Yet very few would dare to say something, suggest a different route, or even turn back. They would suffer, scream from pain, exhaustion, and hopelessness. The group would fall to their deaths. Why?

Is this vision grotesque? Really too grotesque to be true? … Really? …

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No, it is reality.

This is exactly the path, the experience of many seasoned software developers who choose the supposedly easier way in their careers, blindly following a boss. Even though they know better. Even though they would gladly take their careers back into their own hands. Even though they long for freedom, want to discover new routes in the mountains themselves, want to test their fitness, their skills. To achieve something that only few people had accomplished before. And to let other people share in it, even grow further with them.

“Resistance, resistance…”

Where? Does this exist only in our heads? Only in my head? From cowardice? Comfort? Habit? Fear of the unknown?

When is it not too late to take a new route?