Professional retraining: what twenty years in IT have taught me about human energy

A look at the transition from systems engineering to life sciences engineering — and what these two worlds have in common.

After two decades spent designing, optimising and troubleshooting complex IT architectures, I decided to change direction. I left behind lines of code, servers and data flows to turn my attention to life sciences, supporting people and managing our own energy.

At first glance, this 180-degree shift looks like a radical break. Yet, as I’ve gained more experience, one thing has become clear: The laws governing the stability of a computer system and those governing a human being’s equilibrium are closely linked. Changing career paths didn’t mean I had to forget my past, but rather that I had to translate my systemic skills from one language to another.

Here are the key lessons that twenty years in IT have taught me about understanding and nurturing human energy.

1. Emotional bandwidth and cognitive load

In computing, bandwidth refers to the maximum capacity of a channel to transmit data. If you overload a network with requests, the system slows down, packets are lost, and this leads to crash.

Human beings function in exactly the same way. Our attention and our nervous energy constitute our own bandwidth.

• Multitasking is a myth: Just like a processor that performs context switching a computer spends precious time reloading data into memory; a person whose attention is fragmented becomes exhausted.
• Saturation: Burnout is nothing more than an internal denial-of-service (DoS) attack. As notifications, emergencies and responsibilities pile up without the system ever being able to clear its cache, the biological machine eventually says ‘enough is enough’.

2. From technical debt to biological debt

‘Technical debt’ is a concept well known to developers: to get things done quickly, we write imperfect code, promising ourselves we’ll fix it later. But if it builds up, the system becomes inflexible, unstable and impossible to evolve.

When I moved into bioengineering, I discovered the biological debt.

• Skipping a meal, cutting back on sleep, ignoring chronic pain to finish a project: these are lines of poorly written biological code.
• The body is an excellent short-term lender, but its interest rates are usurious. Sooner or later, the debt comes back to haunt us, often in the form of illness or profound exhaustion. Bioengineering teaches us how to repay this debt before total breakdown sets in.

3. The importance of redundancy and resilient architectures

To ensure that a website or app never goes down, IT engineers use the principle of redundancy : if one server goes down, another takes over immediately. This is the basis of high availability.

Applied to humans, this principle becomes the key to psychological and physical resilience:

• Do not rely on a single pillar: If your entire sense of identity and all your energy are based solely on your career (your ‘single server’), the slightest problem at work will bring you down.
• Diversifying energy sources: Pursuing personal projects, maintaining a strong network of friends, and taking part in physical or artistic activities are all ‘secondary servers’ that keep your system running when the main server is overloaded.

4. Input, Output and Homeostasis: the Law of Flows

A computer system receives inputsinputs, processes them, and generates outputsoutputs. If the input data is corrupted, the result will be too (Garbage in, garbage out).

Living organisms follow this same logic of flow, governed by thehomeostasis — an organism’s ability to maintain its internal balance despite external stresses.

• What we eat: The quality of our food, the air we breathe, and also the information we consume (the inputs) directly determines the quality of our mental clarity and vitality (the outputs).
• Regulation: Biological engineering involves observing these feedback loops in order to adjust the parameters before the system becomes destabilised.

Conclusion: The source code changes, but the logic remains the same

Moving from maintaining machines to caring for living beings has not taken me far from my core identity as an engineer. In both worlds, it is a matter of analysing weak signals, diagnosing malfunctions, respecting rest cycles and optimising limited resources.

The main difference? Living organisms cannot be reprogrammed with lines of code or instant fixes. They require time, respect for their natural rhythms, and a deep willingness to listen. Twenty years in IT have taught me the rigour of structures; the engineering of living organisms is now teaching me humility in the face of life’s complexity.