You don't see what's hidden.

Three of us stood at a bus stop on the edge of Omsk in the middle of a Siberian winter, waiting in minus forty-four.

We had come in on the overnight train, and I had woken up with a cold head because the wall beside my bunk was the only thing between me and the outside. The travel budget covered the tickets and the hotel and did not stretch to taxis, so we were on public transport with the concrete testing gear, the boxes for the samples and our safety kit. It took about an hour to reach the power station. A few hours after that I was lying on my stomach under the foundation of a steam turbine, where it was plus forty-four.

Security took most of what we were carrying at the gate. Almost nothing you arrive in can come with you into the space under a turbine block, which is about the height of a filing cabinet lying on its side. You go in flat, into the heat coming off the machine above you, with a torch and whatever fits in one hand.

What we did was refurbishment. Old steam plants, some of them running since the sixties, getting new turbines of a modern generation with better numbers on every line of the datasheet. The new machine sits differently and vibrates differently, and the concrete underneath it was poured for something else. Somebody has to say whether that foundation will take it, and crawling under there with a hammer and a set of gauges is part of how you find out. That was the work I wanted to be the best in the world at.

I graduated in 2013, already a year into the job, and that was the goal I had written for myself. The best structural calculation engineer alive. Dynamic loads, seismic, turbine foundations, the complicated end of it. I was good at it, though not much above average, and two people in that office were on par with me. I can still tell you both their names.

That ambition did not feel small from where I was standing. It felt like the top of the thing. The people a generation ahead of me in that city had built their careers inside the same few companies doing the same work, and the best of them were very good at it. There was nothing else for me to want, because I had never watched anybody do anything else.

By 2017 I had moved to Sakhalin and was working for Fluor, and I was given a project to lead as engineering manager. Moderate budget, not a flagship, the kind of job you are handed to see what you do with it. Nothing that made it hard had anything to do with design.

It was people. My own team, a client with expectations that arrived on a Thursday afternoon and needed answering by Friday, and a large part of the work where I was no longer the expert in the room and everybody including me knew it. I had spent five years building the one thing I was sure of, and I had stepped outside the range of it. I did not fail at the calculation ambition and I did not abandon it. It stopped being the biggest thing I could see.

What took its place was the biggest thing now in view: engineering manager on a multi-billion project somewhere inside Fluor. That is not where I went.

In 2021 I spent a short period as a project manager at Air Products, and then joined a Chinese contractor in Moscow. They had won work in a market where they had no engineering organisation at all, not a weak one, none. No procedures, nothing written down about how any of it was meant to run, which I assumed would be my whole job there.

It was not. Within weeks I was doing estimating and business development, neither of which I had done before. We took that department from zero to more than twenty people in under a year, cycled roughly eight billion euros of proposals through it, and signed a FEED on a two billion dollar project together with our partners. So I set the next ambition, and it was to be the best department manager there is.

Then I moved to Stegra, in Sweden, on the first plant of its kind in the world, and I have been there two and a half years. My role is interface management, which moves on its own, because the project changes phase and the interfaces change with it. For a while I was leading procurement efforts and people started calling me the procurement guy. Then I led the largest contractor we had on site, doing groundwork, which I had never been near at that depth. Recently I helped get the project schedule into a better place, and now I am the planning guy.

None of that was a job change. Same employer, same job title, and I have changed occupation three times inside it.

So I am on a multi-billion-euro programme in Europe that nobody has built before.

If you had described this to the man lying under the turbine foundation in Omsk, he would not have had anywhere to put it. It was not an option he considered and rejected. It was not on the table.

When I was at school, my best friend and I played Heroes of Might and Magic III for hours at a time. Almost the whole map starts black. You know the shape of the world only where you have already walked, and the single way to find out what is in the black is to send a hero into it. You do not get to study the map and then choose. You choose, and the map appears behind you. That is roughly what happened to the three of us who sat in that office in 2013.

One of the two is still in my home city. He cofounded a company about ten years ago that does very complex structural calculations for seismic and other dynamic conditions, which is close to the thing all three of us said we wanted, built as a business instead of a job. The other moved to Australia and has worked there as a structural engineer since 2017. As far as I know, none of us set out for the place we ended up in.

The danger in any of this is not aiming too low. It is deciding you have already seen the ceiling. If the best outcome you can picture is a discipline engineer role at the local company in your home city, because that is what everyone you have watched has done, then that is the whole of what is on offer, and it becomes very reasonable to stop trying. The two people I have just described did not have any more information than I did in 2013.

What the three of us had was motion, not courage and not a plan. We kept doing work we were not yet qualified to be doing, in places we had not been, and the map filled in behind us. Every ambition I have set turned out to be the tallest thing visible from where I happened to be standing, and every one of them was replaced by something I could not have named a year earlier. I assume the one I am carrying now is the same kind of thing.

So, this week.

Think of something you stopped doing because you decided you already knew where it ends. The thing you quietly took off your own list because nobody around you has one. If it still matters to you, do the next small piece of it before you have settled the question of whether it is worth it. The stairwell past a ceiling is never visible from underneath it, and the only way to learn whether there is one is to keep walking.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

Find me on LinkedIn. You're reading The Next Move — a weekly newsletter by Vitalii Lavelin.
​