Benjamim Castell
@benjamimcastell
Not my real name. Not my real face. I'm a software architect at a major US bank. I write under a pseudonym because saying this under my real name would end my career.
Why I started writing
In 2024, I was let go from a bank where I'd spent five years. Five years. Three major projects. A real-time payments integration. A live account balance system for the mobile app. A complete infrastructure migration from manual IIS deployments to Kubernetes.
None of it mattered. I had no political protection. My manager saw me as competition. Not as an asset. I was slowly erased from my own projects. Removed from meetings. My designs presented by others. My responsibilities redistributed. Nobody sent an email about it. One morning I got a dark blue envelope. Standard contract termination language. Very professional.
I was on a work visa. I had 60 days to leave the country.
My wife's green card process saved us from deportation. After that I just stopped pretending. Being good at your job is not enough. It was never enough.
Good engineers keep getting screwed the same way. Everyone sees it. Nobody says anything. They can't.
I can't afford to say it either. But here I am.
25 years across
Finance · Banking · Automotive · Enterprise · Startups
.NET · Java · Python · Go · Node.js
Core banking integrations (Jack Henry) · Cloud architecture (Azure, AWS) · Real-time payments · Digital onboarding · Kubernetes migrations
What this isn't
I'm not against Agile. The original Manifesto was fine. What I write about is everything that came after. The certifications. The theater. The entire industry that makes money from your team being broken and has no reason to actually fix anything.
I'm not selling a framework. I'm not a coach. Nobody here is charging you $3,000 for a two-day workshop. I build systems. I write about what I see.
About the name
Benjamim is a common Brazilian name. That part is real. I'm a Brazilian immigrant. Castell is made up. The AI-generated headshot that used to be on this page was there because I can't show my real face. Same reason I can't use my real name.
Yeah, fake name and no face. Looks shady. I get it. Go on any Reddit thread about Agile or corporate engineering and everyone there is anonymous too. I'm just trying to build something with it instead of posting from a throwaway.
The writing resonates or it doesn't. No headshot changes that.
“I Delivered Three Major Projects and Got Fired Anyway” — 647 upvotes, 146k views on r/ExperiencedDevs. The comments are full of people with 10, 20, 30 years saying “this happened to me too.”
If you want to talk, I read everything.
If you're a director or VP or CTO and you see these patterns in your own org — yeah, I want to hear from you.