Why I Left Civil Engineering to Build iOS Apps

The job that paid well but felt hollow

I graduated from the British University in Egypt with a civil engineering degree. Got my PMP certification. Served in the military. By every external metric, I was on the right path. I had a stable job, a salary, a clear career trajectory.

The salary was $300 a month. In Egypt, that’s livable. But I kept looking at the builders — the people shipping apps, building products, solving problems at scale — and something felt off about the path I was on.

Civil engineering teaches you systems thinking. You learn how components interact, how stress propagates, how small decisions compound into massive outcomes. What I didn’t realize at the time is that software is the same — just faster, cheaper, and with global distribution built in.

June 2023: the first line of Swift

I started teaching myself iOS development in June 2023. No bootcamp, no degree, no background in software. Just an iPhone, a MacBook, and an Udemy course.

The first few months were brutal. Swift felt nothing like the AutoCAD and structural calculation tools I’d spent years mastering. But the engineering mindset transferred. Every bug was a structural failure. Every architecture decision was a load calculation. I stopped fighting the unfamiliarity and started mapping concepts I already knew onto new syntax.

By the end of 2023, I had my first app in the App Store. It wasn’t good. But it was real.

The day I quit

June 2024. I left civil engineering officially. Not because I had revenue, not because I had investors, not because anyone told me it was a good idea. Because I could see clearly that the work I was doing at night — building apps, studying Swift, thinking about products — was the work I wanted to spend my life on.

Egypt has a cost-of-living advantage that most Western founders would kill for. My runway stretches 3-5x longer here than it would in San Francisco or London. That’s not a consolation prize — it’s a legitimate strategic advantage. I’m building with less pressure, more time, and deep market knowledge of a region that most global tech companies ignore.

What I’m building now

Saadni. A neighborhood task marketplace for Egypt — the TaskRabbit that understands this market. Starting in El Tagamoa (Fifth Settlement), Cairo. Targeting the exact community I live in, around people I know, solving a problem I experience daily.

I have no idea if it will work. But I know why I’m building it, who it’s for, and exactly what success looks like. That’s more than most people have when they start. The rest is execution.