I went to college for English. Writing papers seemed to be the only thing I liked to do in school, so I picked the major that I thought would have me write the most papers. I realized later that what I loved about writing papers was the problem solving. I was consumed by figuring out the most compelling way to convey an idea, or most effective way to draw a reader in, or the clearest way to explain something complex.
As college came to an end, I had to figure out what I wanted my career to be. For one reason or another I started by thinking about what industry I would want to be a part of. I considered publishing, but it didn’t seem very attractive to me, and it seemed difficult to be successful in. Then I became aware of the tech space. It looked incredibly attractive; the working from home, the work life balance, all the different interesting products. I had some experience in sales so I decided to pursue some tech companies that might have sales positions open.
Once I got a job at a software consultancy I learned about Agile software development, minimum viable products, lean, sprints, product ownership, so much. I learned about a number of different technologies and how they all fit together. I tried my hand at writing some html first, then some ruby, then I tried The Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. Because of my interest and how much I had learned about software development, I moved into a project management role. I kept messing around with Ruby on Rails here and there, and I picked a few things up from the engineers I was working with.
After a while I started to feel a little left out. I felt like I had blinders on at work. I had almost no understanding of how we were making what we were making. I knew what the products were, but I didn’t know anything about what went into making them. I couldn’t really speak about our products with any real concept of what goes on under the hood. I was tired of being separate from the actual work itself, from the code. I wanted to really get it. I was so tired of just facilitating the work. I wanted to do it.
So I quit. I quit being a project manager and I started my journey at Flatiron Software Engineering Bootcamp. I knew about Flatiron because my company had hired someone as an apprentice that had graduated from the program. Before I quite, I spoke with her about her experience and she only had good things to say. My first day without a job was scary, but I threw myself into learning and I started forgetting about how scared I was and focused on learning.
The more I got into it the less it felt like work and the more it felt like solving problems. I was absorbed. The same way I was when I was writing papers in college. Now I just want to find the clearest, most efficient way to write code. Problem solving is what I like, and with this career switch I finally get to do that as a job. I couldn’t be more excited.
