Three offers. Two paid multiples more. I chose the third.
August 2024. Sitting at Alibaba in Barcelona, doing UX work, watching Artem's conference talk on YouTube. These guys were on a completely different level. I wasn't.
I drop the link in a team channel: "nice overview of LLM trends for beginners ☺️." The beginner is me. The smiley is defensive armor, I'm just passing through, just sharing.
But internally: I was sitting in the wrong seat. The world was moving fast, and I was designing interfaces. Good interfaces. At a big company. For decent money. But not it.
3 offers came in. Enterprise in London: clear career path, serious money. Startup in Berlin: also GenAI, had PMF, unit economics worked. But I could see exactly what it would be, a polished prompt wrapper over ChatGPT for the next 3 years. And then T-Bank.
Both European offers paid multiples more. Even after adjusting for cost of living and taxes, multiples. And crucially: I wouldn't have to go back to Moscow. The same Moscow I'd left right after the war started. The one where everything had turned dark.
But I kept seeing one thing clearly: almost nobody in Europe was doing genuine GenAI work. Not prompts, not wrappers, actually building the system from scratch. T-Bank was. And on a 10-year horizon, I believed growth beats money and safe geography.
So I chose T-Bank. Not through careful pros-and-cons analysis — but because I couldn't imagine explaining to myself in 10 years why I chose London when I had a chance to get inside a technology reshaping everything.
Packed bags. Flew back to Moscow. A week later Biden authorized strikes deep into Russian territory. I went to my manager and quit.
Exhaled. Bought a first-aid kit. Hung a gas mask on the hook where I keep my caps. Kept working.
The first months: reading hundreds of support transcripts. Manual work. Rebuilding practically everything on the team. Reorgs. Politics. Nowhere close to the interesting model work. I kept asking myself: this is what I turned down Berlin for?
March 2026. Artem posts. Not about LLM trends. About how we're rebuilding support at T-Bank together and deploying GenAI at scale. The person whose conference talk made me feel like I was running behind is now writing about work we did together.
The moral: always pick growth over money and over career. Money can come later. Career can be rebuilt. The window to get inside a technology that's changing everything closes once.
Stay tuned
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