There is a story people still tell themselves in 2026 that has not been true for years. It goes like this. If you want a serious tech career you have to leave home. Move to San Francisco, Berlin, London. Get in the room where the work is.

Meet three AmsterdamTech students who never got that memo.

• Gustavo is a CTO in Brazil running a WhatsApp scheduling SaaS that beats US and European competitors on architecture. His server keeps sockets open twenty four seven. His competitors need the browser open. He is talking to investors from São Paulo. Where his laptop sits has nothing to do with the quality of what he ships.

• Samuel is nineteen, based in Nigeria, and is somehow running a home services startup, a web design agency, freelance development work for a US startup, and a content creation project all at once. He is also studying software engineering full time. His clients neither know nor care where he is coding from. They care that the work is good and it is on time.

• Irina trained as a computer science graduate in Europe and now works as an AI consultant in Amsterdam. Her working world is remote by default. Design teams, theoretical physicists, complete strangers, best friends. She has built with all of them across time zones. She is quick to say the diverse perspectives are the point, not a compromise.

Why remote learning was the unlock

None of these careers required moving cities. They required credentials, projects and the discipline to keep learning. Our fully online BS in Software Engineering and BS in AI and Machine Learning Engineering were built for exactly this pattern. Study while you work. Study while you build. Ship a portfolio your next employer or investor can actually click on.

The wedge nobody says out loud

The global e learning market is on track for four hundred billion dollars this year. Employers stopped caring where the classroom was years ago. They care what you can do on Monday morning. In parallel, US visa policy has quietly made global hiring more attractive than ever for the same employers. The result is a market where a well trained developer in Lagos, São Paulo or Manila is now competing for the same roles as one in Amsterdam, and often winning them.

Where you happen to live is no longer the ceiling on the career you can build. It might, in fact, be the reason someone hires you.

What is your excuse now?