Switching to Tech — A Retrospective After 3 years
Today 3 years ago on the 14th of June 2019 I graduated from the Le Wagon coding bootcamp in Tokyo. It’s a special date for me, as it marks the beginning of my life as a software developer — a completely new chapter in my life and a radical change from what I used to do before. Given this anniversary I decided to take a little trip down memory lane, looking into my personal experience, answering the most common questions I get about the decision I took.
This post is for those of you who are considering switching to tech, who might be on the fence as to whether this would be an appropriate path for you, or are curious about what it might entail.
My background
As you can guess from the title, I don’t come from a technical background. I originally enrolled in university to study international relations with the hopes of becoming an ambassador, only to find out in the last year of my studies that this isn’t something I would enjoy doing. I then tried to find my place in the world taking on various (mostly business-related) jobs, with the most formative years being as a procurement specialist at Daikin (an AC manufacturer company).
But while I was quite satisfied with my career path, I was also curious about becoming a developer. I reached out to a few of my friends asking how to get into it, and tried my luck with self-learning apps like Codecademy and Sololearn. None of it worked for me. Using self-learning apps felt like I was just a trained monkey repeating commands, and nothing that I “learnt” through them ever clicked (what is a “hash”? why would we use that instead of an “array”?).
As for my friends’ advice, that usually fell into one of two camps: one group would advise me to start with the very basics (paralleling their own academic journey), learning about data structures, algorithms, and theoretical programming concepts. While the second group encouraged me to jump from the get-go into something more practical with a faster feedback loop, by learning HTML & CSS (two coding languages for building websites).
The first advice fell completely flat. I wasn’t keen on going through piles of books full of very technical terminology, before starting to actually build things. But oddly enough even the second advice didn’t work for me very well. I was definitely happy that I got to quickly see the result of my work when building simple websites, but I found using HTML & CSS frustrating and draining.
Luckily for me, I was doing well in my career, and it wasn’t like I was ever going to switch to tech.
The switch
And then my whole life turned upside down. Due to some personal reasons I ended up in Japan without speaking the language, which made it very difficult to find a job that would leverage my experience. The few job interviews I managed to land always ended up with the same response: “You have an impressive background, but even though you don’t need Japanese to conduct business, your boss and colleagues will expect you to speak in Japanese with them, so we can’t offer you a position.”
After 2 month of unsuccessful job hunting I was left with 2 options: I could either attend an intensive language course and try to get to business proficiency as quickly as possible, or try my luck by switching to an industry that requires hard skills. Unfortunately, neither of the options seemed quite clearcut. On one hand I had been attending a Japanese language course, and although my speaking ability was improving, a proper spoken and written business-level still felt more than a few months away. On the other hand, the only hard skill industry that seemed to make sense (and be possible to) transfer to in a short time was tech, but I was coming with a baggage of bad experience.
In the end I decided to go for the tech route, hoping that by joining a course my learning experience would be better. After a bit of googling I found a coding bootcamp in Tokyo led in English, which seemed to tick all the boxes. So I jumped on board and took off for this new adventure.
My experience at the coding bootcamp
The first bootcamp day came soon after and I got to meet my batch mates. The first surprise that awaited me was the wild diversity in the backgrounds of participants (to not mention the nationalities): a banker, property investor, and entrepreneur would spend their time together with a language teacher, social worker, and even a construction worker, with ages ranging from 19 to over 40. It seemed like no matter where people came from and their (assumed) capabilities, they would all be able to find their way into tech. And our backgrounds really showed up when we were pitching tech projects to work on — from an app that aggregates data from all eCommerce websites where the entrepreneur was selling his products to help with accounting and administration, to an app that would allow for better cataloging and information sharing of the status of children being helped by the social services.
The bootcamp itself turned out to be exactly what I needed. The mixture of in-person dedicated study time, paired with teacher support and socialization amongst peers was just the right concoction to keep me going attentive and energized throughout the entire experience.
My worries about whether I would enjoy coding after the bad experience with web design were also quickly dispersed as I soon learnt just how much variety there is in the coding world. If you think about a car, there’s its look (with the coding equivalent being UI Design), the user panel displaying all kind of information about the car (Frontend Development), the motor and rest of construction that makes the car run (Backend Development), the assembly line where the car is made (Dev Ops), the testing processes to make sure the car works well (Quality Assurance) and much more. All of these require a different way of thinking and communicating with the machine (coding languages), and as such are fit to different kinds of personalities. It was among these that I found my calling and decided to go the route of a Backend Developer.
9 weeks after I joined the bootcamp I had my graduation ceremony. I immediately jumped on the job hunting process again and after a bit over a month I started a fresh new job in what I wanted to do. However, after a few weeks in, I found myself not thinking of this as a victory.
The path to success
For starters, my salary was quite low. Driven by the fact that I had been running on borrowed money for so many months I felt forced to accept an offer that was lower than what I would make by teaching English. Other points contributing to my low satisfaction were tied to how developers are viewed in Japan (essentially blue-collar workers) and general Japanese style in management (e.g.: “you are going to do this kind of work, even though this isn’t what you signed up for, nor what you want to do”).
“Was it really worth it to have spent so much time and money on this?” I frequently pondered.
But the thing is: having a job in the industry, no matter how unsatisfactory, is a great asset. In my case it allowed me to grow by leaps and bounds, learning much more and much faster than I would have ever been able to on my own. Concepts such as coding conventions, code clarity, and versioning history require interacting with other developers and as such are really difficult to learn on your own.
After just a bit less than a year I knew enough to be viewed by recruiters and other companies as a developer who can be productive from the get-go, which began opening many doors. Point in case: the team lead at my second company was genuinely surprised of my level, considering he viewed me as still pretty much “fresh off the bootcamp” — and all the points I surprised him at were acquired during my work experience.
All this to say that things don’t always go as planned, and we don’t always get our happy ending when we expect it. But perseverance, hard work and a bit of luck, things will start falling in place. And so today, three years after graduating from the bootcamp, I can happily say that I found a job that is really fun, that challenges me to grow and learn, and makes me really happy to have decided to make the switch.
Conclusion
I never thought I would get into tech, and were it not for the personal crisis I might have not. But if I could go back in time and talk to myself, this is what I would say:
- Tech IS for you: don’t get discouraged by your concepts of what tech is or what it requires. The world of tech is very diverse with roles catering to a wide array of personalities, so you are certain to find something that could fit you.
- If one path doesn’t work out, try another one: don’t get discouraged if your initial efforts to get into tech prove unsuccessful. Be it learning to code or landing the first job, there are many routes you can take, so find the one that will work for you.
- Your first job doesn’t define your career: don’t get discouraged if your first company ends up being a place you don’t like. There is a lot of mobility within tech, and if you make sure to work on yourself soon you’ll have companies fighting to have you.
So for anyone reading, this message is for you: go for it. Make the leap and change your life to something better. You’ll be happier for it.
