I began/continue to code because...
I sort of fell in love with it...and stuck with it. I was a business major in college and had no idea what I was going to do when I graduated. I had a friend get me into a local tech company. I started out doing data entry because I figured it was a big company with good benefits. I had a new mortgage and more importantly a new son that I had to take care of. As I started to get new opportunities in the company, I started asking a lot of questions around automating processes. One day, my team was tasked with QA'ing a new engine in a product we were using. I wasn't even working on the QA, but I started asking how things worked. I bugged the manager of the team doing the development so much that one day she asked if I wanted to come work on the development team. What was even more surreal, was she asked if I wanted to work remote (they were in Southern CA, I was in northern NV). Opportunities in this company like that didn't come along often. And hey! I got to travel to a new place.
When I joined this new development team, it was my first, true coding and development team. It was a company proprietary language, very pascal like. I wouldn't say it was real engineering, but certainly my first development job. As time went on, there was talk of a new service taking over that was Java-based. All of us on our team had deer-in-the-headlight looks on our faces because no one knew Java. I decided to go back to school and learn. That's when I think I really decided I wanted to go the engineering track.
I have now been an engineer for about ten years. The reason I love engineering is because every day is different and no matter how much you know...there is still more to learn. I have been incredibly lucky to have mentors and managers that have given me awesome opportunities to learn, grow and lead. And now, just as much as I love learning new things, I love giving back by mentoring junior engineers coming up. As long as I can learn and as long as I can give back, I will be an engineer.
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