Unboxable in Tech: 30 Years of Being the Wrong Shape

This is a submission for the 2026 WeCoded Challenge : Echoes of Experience Every time a recruiter or staffing agency reaches out, the conversation ends exactly the same way. "Your profile is really interesting… but honestly, we're not sure which box to put you in." At first, I took it for polite awkwardness. Then for a backhanded compliment. Today, I take it as the most honest diagnosis anyone has ever given me. Thirty years of coding, modeling, debugging at 3 a.m. because the business problem hadn't been understood upstream. Thirty years of building systems that work — and the industry keeps looking at me like an IKEA cabinet without instructions. What if the problem wasn't me? Act 1 — The TO7 and the Accidental Revelation First contact: a Thomson TO7 in a classroom, middle school, mid-eighties. A slightly mad math teacher showing us how to make characters dance in BASIC on a cassette tape. For a thirteen-year-old, it was Narnia with GOTOs. Three years later, pure humanities track: La