I Jumped Out of a Plane to Have Something Interesting to Say at Parties. The Work Was the Interesting Thing All Along.

I got into skydiving to impress girls at parties. I am not going to dress that up. I was a technologist in my twenties, I worked on things that I believed — correctly, as it turned out — were genuinely important, and I could not for the life of me work out how to make any of it sound interesting to someone holding a glass of wine and looking for a reason not to walk away. So I signed up for an AFF course — accelerated freefall, where you jump solo from day one with two instructors holding on to you — paid up front because I am not a person who does things by halves, and threw myself out of a perfectly good aeroplane.

I hated it.

Not violently. Not with any great conviction. I did not hate it the way you hate something that frightens you. I hated it the way you hate something that disappoints you — the gap between the story you expected to tell and the experience you actually had. The first jump was fine. The second was fine. The third and fourth were fine. Everything was fine, which is the most damning word in the English language when you have paid for a course of jumps expecting to feel transformed.

Then came the fifth jump, and everything went wrong. I say wrong — it was line twists, which any experienced skydiver will tell you are a fairly routine malfunction that you kick out of. You look up, you see the lines are twisted, you kick, you spin, the canopy inflates properly, and you carry on. It is not dramatic. It is not cinematic. But it was the first time anything had gone wrong, the first time the script deviated, the first time I had to solve a problem in real time with the ground approaching at a rate that concentrated the mind wonderfully.

I loved it. From that moment, I genuinely loved it.

The adversity was the catalyst. Not the freefall, not the view, not the adrenaline — the problem-solving. The moment when something did not go to plan and I had to think, act, adapt. Researchers at Queensland University of Technology found exactly this: extreme sports participants are not thrill-seekers but self-knowledge-seekers. The value is not in the danger. The value is in discovering what you are capable of when the stakes are real.

Funny thing, though. I only made it to that fifth jump because I had bought the course up front. If it had been pay-per-jump, I would have walked away after the third. The sunk cost — that most derided of cognitive biases — was the thing that kept me in long enough to discover genuine love for the sport.

The Signal That Collapsed

Here is the thing I did not understand at twenty-five. The reason I thought I needed skydiving was not that my work was boring. It was that I did not know how to talk about it. I had internalised, without ever examining it, the technology industry's catastrophic inability to tell its own story.

I was building things that mattered. The work I do now — things like NDX:Try, giving local government organisations free cloud sandboxes to experiment with AI before committing a penny of public money — is objectively more exciting than a skydive. It affects millions of people. It changes how public services work. It is, by any honest measure, a more compelling story than "I fell out of a plane and threw a pilot chute."

But I could not tell that story. And the reason I could not tell it is the same reason the technology industry haemorrhages the very people it most needs.

There is a concept in evolutionary psychology called costly signalling theory. The idea is straightforward: a signal's value is proportional to its cost. A peacock's tail is expensive to grow and maintain, which is precisely what makes it a reliable indicator of fitness. Skydiving, when I started, was a costly signal. It was unusual, it was mildly dangerous, and it was the kind of thing that made people lean in at parties.

But skydiving had been democratising for decades. Tandem jumping arrived in 1983, turning what was once a military skill into a stag-do gift experience. By the time I was doing my AFF, skydiving was no longer unusual. The cost had collapsed. The signal had collapsed with it. I was paying for an increasingly commoditised experience whilst ignoring the genuinely rare and valuable thing I already had — work that was interesting, complex, and consequential.

I should thank Adam Craven here, because he was the person who first showed me that skydiving was accessible. He revealed to me that this outrageous-sounding thing was actually quite safe, quite reachable, quite normal. And he was right. But in doing so, he also inadvertently demonstrated the mechanism that undermined the entire exercise. The moment something extreme becomes accessible, it stops functioning as a signal of distinction. The moment everyone can do it, nobody is impressed by it.

What I should have been doing was learning to tell the story of the work. The same mechanism that devalued my skydiving story — signal collapses when cost collapses — is exactly what happened to the technology industry's narrative about itself.

I have watched this play out in three distinct modes, and I have been guilty of all of them. The first is the jargon fortress — describing mechanism instead of consequence, burying the human impact under layers of technical vocabulary that function less as communication and more as a drawbridge. The second is borrowed excitement — grafting someone else's story onto yours because you do not trust that what you actually built is worth talking about. That was me with the skydiving. The third is audience of one — telling the story exclusively to people who already understand it, who already care, who are already inside the walls. Every organisation I have seen that cannot recruit diverse talent is doing at least two of these simultaneously.

You want to see what these look like in the wild? The jargon fortress is a job advert that says "seeking expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Terraform IaC, and GitOps pipelines" when what it means is "we need someone who can build systems that a million people rely on without thinking about." The borrowed excitement was me — literally me, standing at parties talking about freefall when I should have been talking about the work. And the audience of one is the conference talk packed with architecture diagrams that gets a standing ovation from the two hundred people in the room who already agree with every word, and reaches precisely zero of the people you actually need to walk through the door.

Then Like Now

The technology industry has a storytelling problem, and it is not an aesthetic failure. It is a structural one with measurable consequences.

The BCS Diversity Report 2024 found that at current rates, gender parity in UK technology will take 283 years. Two hundred and eighty-three years. Women hold 21-22% of software development roles. Seventy per cent of computer scientists do not match the stereotypical interest profile that the industry projects to the outside world — and that mismatch is not random. It is the direct result of a story the industry tells about itself that is narrower, duller, and more exclusionary than the reality.

Storytelling did not create those numbers, and storytelling alone will not fix them. But storytelling determines who even considers showing up.

"OK," you concede, "but surely the exciting industries do better?" They do not. Gaming is 76% male with 2% Black developers. The space industry is 80% male. Excitement does not fix diversity. If anything, excitement that is marketed to a narrow demographic entrenches it.

The problem is not that technology is boring. The problem is that the people who tell technology's story — people like me, for most of my career — told it in a way that resonated with people who were already like us. We described the work in jargon that excluded. We celebrated the wrong things: the all-nighter, the hackathon, the hero deploy. We built a culture that signalled "this is for a specific kind of person" and then wondered, with apparently genuine bewilderment, why only that specific kind of person showed up.

Universities graduate diverse computer science students at twice the rate that companies hire them. The pipeline is not the problem. The pipeline was never the problem. The problem is what happens at the other end — the job adverts, the interview culture, the 50% fewer callbacks for African-American-sounding names, the mythology that this work requires a particular personality rather than a particular capability.

IEEE found that 66% of engineers do not match the public stereotypes of what an engineer looks or acts like. The majority of the people already doing this work do not fit the image the industry uses to recruit more of them. That is not a diversity problem. That is a marketing hallucination.

The Confidence Problem

Here is what I actually learnt from the skydiving-at-parties experiment: confidence predicts attractiveness more reliably than any specific hobby or achievement. It was never the skydiving. It was the way I talked about it — the energy, the conviction, the willingness to be animated about something. The specific thing was almost irrelevant.

Which means the technology industry does not need to become more exciting. It needs to become more confident about what it already is. The work is extraordinary. Building systems that serve millions of people. Solving problems that governments and corporations and communities cannot solve without you. The engineer who builds an AI-powered translation service for council residents who do not speak English is doing something more meaningful than anyone who has ever jumped out of a plane. But that engineer has been taught — by the industry, by the culture, by two decades of hoodie-wearing founder mythology — that the work is not the story. That you need something else, something outside, something extreme, to be interesting.

That is a lie. And it is a lie with consequences. Every person who does not apply because they looked at the industry and thought "that is not for me" is a perspective we lose. Every team that is less diverse than it could be is a team that will build less robust, less creative, less representative technology. The diversity deficit is not a moral decoration. It is an engineering failure. I am aware of the risk in that framing — reducing people to engineering inputs is exactly the kind of dehumanisation I am arguing against. But the engineering frame is what this industry responds to, and I would rather use a language that gets heard than a language that gets ignored.

I must be honest about the limits of this argument, though. I am not saying that if we just told better stories, the diversity problem would vanish. Structural barriers are real. Pay gaps are real. Hostile cultures are real. The outdoor recreation industry is 72% white despite decades of campaigns to make it more accessible, which tells you that storytelling alone is insufficient. But storytelling is where it starts. You cannot recruit someone who never considered applying. You cannot change a culture that does not believe it needs changing. The story is the first domino, not the last.

The Wind Tunnel and the Work

I have not jumped out of a plane in ten years. Life intervened. My wife, the inimitable Hannah Nesbitt-Smith ; who, it must be said, has absolutely zero interest in skydiving whatsoever — and our children have restructured my relationship with risk in ways that a twenty-five-year-old paying for an AFF course could not have predicted.

Nowadays, all I get is indoor skydiving. I recently introduced my friend Patrick Crompton to the wind tunnel, and he has found the same deep joy in it that I did. There is something about the sport — even the indoor version, even the sanitised, controlled, nobody-is-going-to-die version — that teaches you things about yourself that you cannot learn any other way. Body position. Awareness. The way small adjustments produce outsized effects.

I will be honest, though: in the wind tunnel, I more closely resemble a daddy longlegs bashing off the walls than I do any of the incredible tunnel flyers you might see on YouTube. And if anyone ever asks what I do, I always show them someone else's videos. The gap between aspiration and reality is something I have learnt to find funny rather than embarrassing, which may be the most useful thing skydiving has taught me.

But here is the thing. When someone asks what I do for a living — not what I do for fun, but what I do for work — and I tell them, with conviction and energy, that I build platforms that let local government experiment with AI at zero cost, or that I work on systems that catalogue twenty-four thousand open source repositories across the entire UK government estate, or that I am trying to make it so that a council officer with an idea can go from "what if" to a working prototype in fifteen minutes — the reaction is the same as it ever was with the skydiving. Better, actually. Because the story is real, it is consequential, and it does not require me to have jumped out of anything.

The work was the interesting thing all along. I just needed to learn how to say so.

What Must Change

I am not going to end this with a ten-point plan. The problem is too structural for that and I am too honest to pretend otherwise. But I will say three things.

First: if you work in technology, learn to tell the story of what you do with the same energy you would use to describe jumping out of a plane. Not the jargon. Not the stack. The impact. The why. The human consequence. If you cannot make someone lean in when you describe your work, the problem is not the work. It is you.

Second: if you hire in technology, look at your job adverts, your careers pages, your conference sponsorships, and ask who they are speaking to. Pull up your three most recent job adverts. Read them aloud. If they sound like they were written by and for the same person, they were. Goldman Sachs rebuilt its entire employer brand around showing what the work actually looked like, not what the mythology said it looked like. The technology industry — an industry that employs some of the most creative people on earth — has somehow produced the least imaginative recruitment marketing in the history of professional services. That is fixable.

Third: recognise that storytelling is necessary but not sufficient. Better stories will widen the top of the funnel. They will not, on their own, fix the cultures that push people out. The 283-year figure from BCS is not just a recruitment problem. It is a retention problem, a promotion problem, a whose-voice-gets-heard-in-the-room problem. Storytelling opens the door. What happens after the door opens is a different fight, and an older one.

I am aware of the irony. This entire piece argues that signals collapse when they become accessible, and then prescribes making our storytelling more accessible. The mechanism I diagnosed is the mechanism I am invoking. But here is the difference: a collapsing skydiving signal costs you a party anecdote. A collapsing recruitment signal costs you 283 years.

I started jumping because I thought the work was not enough. I was wrong. The work was always enough. We just need to get better at saying so — and then we need to build the kind of workplaces that prove it.

(Views in this article are my own.)