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As millions of professionals face career stagnation, R&D Lead Technician Aleksandr Iakimenko draws on his career in technology to explain why a degree does not have to define a career, how a tech startup can offer room to grow, and how solving technical problems can open the door to leadership.
Career stagnation is rarely as visible as a layoff. A recent study by the Burning Glass Institute and NYU School of Professional Studies examined 1.3 million U.S. career histories and revealed that nearly one in four mid-career professionals had reached a plateau, remaining employed while their pay and promotion prospects stalled.
To understand how professionals can keep growing through a change of field, country, and role, we turned to Aleksandr Iakimenko. Today, he is an R&D Lead Technician at Gigantic who designs the hardware and software behind remotely operated arcade machines. Still, he began his career as an accountant-economist at a construction company, taught himself IT, moved to Israel, and gradually took on work that brought him closer to the technology he had been interested in. His career invites us to ask whether our current work reflects what genuinely interests us, where we might find room to grow, and how far we could go by taking on problems beyond our original job description.
Work tends to be more satisfying when it matches what we truly care about. In two studies that followed 1,775 people in Iceland for 12 years, psychologist Kevin Hoff and his team found that people whose jobs matched their teenage interests were more satisfied with their work a decade later.
Aleksandr Iakimenko had an interest in computers and electronics since childhood, but didn't have a chance to study computer science at university. In 2008, he graduated from Moscow State University of Technologies and Management with a specialist degree in economics. After university, he worked as an accountant-economist at a construction company, still realizing his desire to work with technology. Aleksandr started learning programming and information technology on his own to enter the field and, from 2014 to 2016, he worked as an IT system administrator for the Federal Tax Service in the Novosibirsk region.
“What we learn in our youth does not necessarily set the course for our entire working lives,” says Iakimenko. “If you keep coming back to a certain subject, let yourself explore it. You might start by learning on your own, working on a small project, or taking on a related task at your job. Changing careers can take time, but the first step is often just starting to learn.”
Finding work in a new field can be the next challenge on the way to a career you find fulfilling. Aleksandr advises job seekers to consider young, growing companies alongside large corporations. For him, that opportunity came in 2018, when he joined Gigantic, then a startup behind the remote arcade game Clawee.
Aleksandr recalls: “At that time, I had moved to Israel with my family. Learning Hebrew and interviewing in a new country were difficult, but I had the chance to show how I worked through technical problems in practice. The gaming company invited me to join their projects in technical support team, and that opportunity opened a new chapter in my career.”
Over several years, he helped build, install, and maintain hundreds of machines as the fleet grew. These machines powered Clawee, letting players control them through a mobile game and watch the action from afar. Some games needed special equipment, so Iakimenko designed parts of their control systems and combined motors, sensors, cameras, and software. As more people discovered the game, it won Samsung’s Best Indie Game award in 2020 and was listed among the 70 highest-grossing apps in the United States in 2021. By early that year, it had 8 million downloads, and later that year it reached 1.5 million active players. With more players, the real machines Aleksandr maintained saw even more use.
Running the machines day and night created new challenges. The claw mechanisms would overheat and break, so Iakimenko introduced a separate cooling system that stopped these failures. He also created automated reset and reload systems. To cut down on manual prize restocking, he designed a win-detection sensor and a rotating platform that recorded a win and returned the prize to the machine. His solutions made it easier to manage the growing fleet as they significantly reduced the manual work needed to keep the machines running.
The product evolved, so did Iakimenko’s role: he moved from assembling and supporting machines to developing controllers, software, and automated systems. In March 2025, he became R&D Lead Technician. Since then, he has designed an electronic board that controls the arcade machines. He also wrote the software that tells the motors how to move, stops mechanisms from traveling too far, and helps the machines resume operation after a fault.
Beyond the standard claw machines, Iakimenko worked on one-of-a-kind games that cannot be bought anywhere else. For three of them- a scale game, a dragon game, and a frog game- he developed the electronics, connected them to the game mechanics, and wrote the code together with the team. He created the fourth, a submarine game, entirely on his own, from the idea and design to the electronics, code, and on-screen animation. He also built control boards and electronics that brought an online lotto machine and an online marble race into the company's remote-play system.
Over years of working with machines that had to meet different demands, Iakimenko developed his own method for creating custom automated systems. He starts with the task the machine needs to perform, then examines the existing equipment to see what can be adapted and what needs to be built. From there, he brings together mechanical parts, electronics, and software, testing them as a single system until it works in practice.
“The more of a product you understand, the more problems you can take responsibility for,” Iakimenko notes.
His experience has also been valued outside the gaming industry. Kotleak, an Israeli startup developing an industrial ultrasonic leak detector, brought him in as an outside expert to improve its prototype. After his changes, the device's battery life grew from about 24 hours to up to 20 days, and its wireless range increased from about 10 meters to more than 30 meters. He then built four working units for a pilot at an industrial site.
Aleksandr Iakimenko’s next step builds on skills he developed long after earning his degree. Each new task gave him a reason to learn, and each solution prepared him for greater responsibility. For readers reconsidering their own direction, his experience offers a useful starting point: identify the work that interests you, find an opportunity to practice it, and consider what you need to learn to take it further. A career can keep developing even when its direction changes.