Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
⚠️ Content warning: This article discusses depression, anxiety and impostor syndrome. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.
I opened this episode the way I'd open a real conversation back home: with a mate in my hand. For those who don't know it, mate is a bitter Argentine tea you brew in one cup and pass around a circle — a "forever tea," a friend of mine once called it, because you just keep adding water. It's a symbol of who we are, and of the fact that we share: one cup, many people. I started there because today's guest is a close friend who carries a lot of what I love about where I come from. Pablo Huusmann is Argentine, like me, and his story is a double gift — a powerful reinvention, and a reminder of a culture we both grew up in, the kind that teaches you to fight for everything and to keep changing things until they work.
There's also a detail I'm a little proud of: I was the first person to ask Pablo, "Why don't you try IT?" He said, "I don't know." This is where that question led.
A house full of numbers
Pablo trained as an aeronautical engineer, and the reason is lovely in its ordinariness. His mum was a maths teacher, his dad an accountant, and his childhood home was "numbers, numbers, numbers." He fell in love with equations the way other kids fall in love with football — they were puzzles. At 17 he opened a careers book, went straight to engineering because everyone said it was "a lot of maths and physics," and the first listing was aeronautical engineering. He'd barely seen a plane; he grew up in a small town with a tiny airport. He chose it on curiosity alone, and he's never regretted it — even though he never worked a day as an aeronautical engineer. "I didn't fail at it," he told me. "I just didn't miss it." Engineering, for him, was never really about planes. It was about taking a problem, making it simple, and solving it — a skill he now uses on everything.
Argentina to Aotearoa, and the word "infrastructure"
The move to New Zealand started, as these things do, with a visa. In 2016, planning their next adventure after a false start in Costa Rica, Pablo and his wife stumbled onto working holiday visas. New Zealand looked like the easier door, and everyone who'd ever been there described it with a fond memory. The visas are individual, though — his wife got hers, he didn't, so they spent a year saving every peso, not spending a cent, until they could come together and he got his from inside the country.
We bonded over a particular immigrant comedy: arriving fluent enough to watch subtitled TV, and then discovering that a real conversation in a New Zealand accent is a different sport entirely. I told him about my first months here, coming out of meetings and confessing to my manager that I'd understood maybe half of what was said — "at what point did they say the word infrastructure? Because I have no idea." Pablo still carries a pen and paper into meetings to this day, grabbing the first word he can catch so he can ask about it afterwards. "My phone rings and I think, 'here we go again.'" It's a small thing, but it's the texture of starting your professional life over in a second language, and it never fully goes away.
Fingiendo demencia
Aeronautical engineering isn't a big industry anywhere, so in New Zealand Pablo took the welcoming hand the construction industry offered — two weeks to a job in a materials lab, designing asphalt mixes for roads. It was meant to be a couple of years until his papers came through. COVID stretched it to four and a half. And somewhere in there, he got stuck — not just in a job he was enjoying less and less, but legally: on his visa, with a residence application pending, he couldn't resign or change roles without risking everything. Legally stuck, and mentally stuck.
His word for how he coped is one only an Argentine would reach for: fingiendo demencia — literally "feigning dementia," our slang for pretending nothing's wrong while everything is. "I felt like that's how I was living," he said. "Just focused on my job, Monday to Friday, and someday the residence will come and solve everything." He insists he didn't suffer too much at the time — and then, with the honesty that makes him such a good guest, corrects himself: "although I was." It was only when the papers finally came and the pressure released that he could see where he'd actually been. "I was in a bad place. Depressed. But pretending I wasn't."
He named the deeper trap, too, and it's one I know in my bones. When you pretend, you don't let anyone ask how you're really doing. Pablo's version came wrapped in care for others — "I always try to take care of people, so I think, I don't need to say anything, because then they'll have to take care of me." It's the old lie that telling someone your problems makes you a burden. And underneath it, the one that does the most damage: "if I say what I'm feeling, it becomes real." So you don't say it. And it wasn't only the job. His visa meant he couldn't go home — three years by then since he'd left, with nephews he'd never met, friends' kids he'd never met, parents in their seventies. If he just kept quiet, he reasoned, everything would stay still until the papers let him go back.
The epiphany at the lights
I told Pablo about my own version, because it's almost the same shape. Before I left Argentina, I promised myself: four years, and if I come back, it's not a failure — it's a choice. I was luckier than him in my work, but I had these moments of standing outside my own life. I was driving once, stopped at the lights at Remuera and Upland Road, looked at the street names and the strangers, and thought, "What the fuck am I doing here? Why can't I just go and see my brother, my mum, my dad?" I still get goosebumps telling it. Dissociating is the word, I think — "who are you, what's happening here?" — and then the fingiendo demencia clicks back in: nothing to see here, move on.
Pablo's reframe of all this is the most useful idea in the episode. He doesn't see the not-talking as a failure — he sees the whole experience as depending entirely on mindset. The same epiphany at the lights is either "what am I doing here?" or "look where I am," and which one you get depends on the road your mind is already on. (I gently pushed back on the word failure — I spent two years deep in depression without telling the people closest to me, and I'd call that a wound more than a failure. But his point stands: the situation is fixed; the meaning is yours.)
You have a choice
So how did he actually move? It connects, neatly, to my conversation with Sachin Jain a couple of episodes back, who's evangelical about the idea that you always have a choice. Pablo's account of making that choice has three parts, and I love that he refuses to pretend it was all grit. First, willpower and a conscious decision — he's an introvert who's "always thinking about my choices," even mid-conversation. Second, luck, which he says we don't credit nearly enough. And third, support, "because it's much harder to do things on your own." For him, that's Julia, his wife — one of the pillars he leans on to make any decision. With those three things, the change wasn't easy, but it was clear: he could see where to go, and he could feel when he'd made the right call. The day he started the bootcamp and wrote his first lines of code, he was happy — and he reminded himself of that every single day. That feeling, he says, is the compass.
When he tells the part about resigning — Friday his last day, Monday the bootcamp, no rest in between — I asked about the fear. He shrugged it off. The fear was in handing over the resignation; once Monday came, it was pure excitement. (I would have been terrified. But that's me.)
The harsh bit
The hardest stretch came after the bootcamp, and it's the part of the "tech always has jobs" myth nobody tells you. The promise is that the world is going digital and you'll always be employed. It falls flat the moment you actually have to get in — into what Pablo calls "the club." Before IT, he'd walked into every interview and walked out with the job. IT was different: for the first time, an interview felt like sitting an exam at university. Solve this. How would you do that. Recursion he's never used in his life, but had to be able to explain. He'd come out, look up the questions, realise he'd known the answers, and drown in frustration.
We talked about whether that's the right way to interview juniors — I don't think either of us fully knows — but Pablo, generously, said that even as he describes its flaws, he can't think of a better process. What he learned underneath it is the thing worth holding: the interview is not the job. Most people who can get an interview can do the work; the hard part is proving it. And as the rejections stacked up — email after email beginning "Unfortunately…" — the real battle started, the one inside. Some days he could tell the voice "shut up, I can do this." Other days he cried. He's clear that it was textbook impostor syndrome, more common still for career-changers coming from outside the industry, and that — he's been told — it never entirely goes away.
This is where his three-part theory pays off, because support is what carried him. The search took twelve months. He started a side gig around month ten as the savings drained. And through it, Julia kept saying the thing he couldn't say to himself: "I see you every day, putting in the hours, the effort, studying, applying. Be patient. I'm here. I got you." I happened to be talking to Julia at an event near the end of those twelve months, checking in, and she told me he'd just got another "sorry to inform you" letter — and that she kept reminding him she'd seen him do the work. Watching the two of them decide, together, "fuck it, we're doing this," was one of the most quietly impressive things I've seen.
The flat white effect
When I asked what actually landed him the job, his answer wasn't technical. It was relationships. He described the months as a plate-spinning act — version 32 of the CV, cover letters, daily LinkedIn posts, applications, events, follow-ups, courses, a real project to keep learning — all at once, while also, somehow, needing a job. The thing that held it together was a to-do list and the circle of control: do this today, leave that for tomorrow, tick the boxes, take the small dopamine hit, move to the next.
And then there's the lovely, very Kiwi mechanism he leaned on: the "flat white effect," a phrase he credits to Paoli, an Argentine who hosts events in Auckland. The idea is that every New Zealander is about two degrees of separation from anyone, and if you ask for a coffee, you'll get a coffee and a real conversation. Pablo did it heaps — but another recruiter, Lucas Grossi, pushed him a step further: don't just meet people, build a relationship. Tag them on a relevant post, stay in their orbit, so that when an opening appears, they think of you. He even made a video CV and sent it to all his LinkedIn contacts. The job he's in now came from a company he'd cold-dropped his CV to two years earlier, didn't get, and simply never lost touch with. Two years later, an email: "I've got a possible opening — are you interested?"
But here's the part I most respect. After making all that sound easy, Pablo stopped me and told the truth. "Going to an event and talking to people is terrifying. I'd sit in my car for 20 minutes first, talking to myself — 'this is normal people, this is not a mountain.'" The connection works, and it's also genuinely hard, and doing it anyway is the brave part. I confessed I've walked out of events faking a phone call just to escape the feeling of being watched and judged — a feeling that, I'm fairly sure, is never actually true. We do it scared, or we don't do it.
A hammer, and a door
I ask every guest for a metaphor for their relationship with work, and Pablo gave me a first for the series: a hammer. Not romantic — useful. "A hammer is a tool you use to build whatever's in your mind. Work is a tool for me to become a better person, but also a way to live my life outside of work. At the end of the day it builds something good for society. But it's no more than a tool, and a part of your life." After seven episodes of oceans and torches and waka, there's something bracing about a man who looks at work and sees, clearly and without resentment, an instrument.
He's at home in data now, having moved across from product, and the way he frames the future is the healthiest thing I heard. "I stopped planning for the future after COVID. Today it's data. Do I enjoy it? Yes. Okay, let's keep going." As a Lord of the Rings devotee, I had to reach for Tolkien — going out your door is a dangerous business, because you never know where you'll be swept off to. Pablo didn't know what he'd find when he set out. What he found, at minimum, is that he's standing at the door, and glad to be.
Change is for the brave
I close every episode by asking for a whisper to the whole industry. Pablo, knowing I'd push him, gave three. To anyone changing careers or migrating — which is just changing your whole life — "change is for the brave. You going through this, you are brave. Just keep going." And to anyone waking up to a job in tech, a sharper one, especially now: "Who are you helping with the work that you're doing?" Less profit, more direction. The why over the what — which, as I told him, might be the most important question there is.
He left one more thing for anyone in the thick of it: rely on people. Send the LinkedIn message, go to the event, talk to one or two people, build the relationship — and if it still doesn't work out, that's okay too. It's not the end of the world. Focus on your family, your friends, and find happiness wherever else you can. Coming from a man who spent four and a half years feigning he was fine, and then chose, deliberately and bravely, to change who he was — it's worth taking to heart.
(We've promised each other a second episode, in Spanish, about immigration and what it actually means to be Argentine here. We'll subtitle it for everyone else. Watch this space.)
Mind Middleware is a podcast about the invisible space between doing and being — honest conversations about mental health in tech. If this resonated, share it with someone you care about. And if you're struggling, you're not alone: in Aotearoa New Zealand, call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.**