What I do, and what it costs

I was Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse, working to a Chief Technology Officer who sat on the Executive Board, when the merger with UBS was announced. I moved to UBS in 2024 as Global Technology Reward Lead, while the two banks were being integrated. Thirteen years at Credit Suisse in total, sixteen across the two banks. The work was global rather than Swiss: technology teams in Poland, India, Singapore and New York as well as Zürich.

That is the qualification. Here is the reason.

I spent the integration in the room where it was decided, about people who were not. The technology workforce in the Credit Suisse remit was 13,000. Two lists were being drawn at the same time: who goes, and who must not go under any circumstances.

Those are compliments. Not one of them tells you what breaks if she leaves.

The second list was written differently. She holds the relationship with the regulator. He is the only one who understands the migration sequence. One line each, concrete, and the room could see exactly what would break.

I was not the one making those calls. I was in the room while they were made.

Then I walked out and could not write my own line either. I had watched it from the inside and I still described myself in adjectives for months. If it took me that long, the question is not whether you are clever enough. Nobody gets there alone, because the whole difficulty is that you cannot see yourself from outside.

And I did not start with the full strategy. I did not spend twelve months mapping my runway before I began. I did not start by building an email list. I started, and I learned the rest by doing it.

Nothing dramatic happens. That is the problem with this particular cost. Nobody tells you that you have got it wrong, because nobody outside your own head is tracking it.

You spend the money on the wrong thing first. A website, a brand identity, a LinkedIn refresh, a photographer. All of it is work you can start on a Tuesday without deciding anything, and none of it survives finding out what you actually sell. It is expensive procrastination because it feels like progress.

You spend the runway on conversations that were never going to convert. A wide description gets you meetings with people who are being polite. They are polite because there is nothing specific enough to say no to. Six of those and you have lost a quarter and learned nothing you could act on.

Then, somewhere around month seven, you take the first client who says yes. Not the right one. The first one. And that client sets your price, your scope and your reputation for the next two years, because you had nothing else and they knew it.

The last cost is the one nobody says out loud. You go back. Not because the practice could not have worked, but because you never got far enough to find out, and a salary is a very reasonable answer to a question you have run out of money to keep asking.