I'd love to hear if you've transitioned to tech from another career and why you decided to make the switch!
🌟Your answer may be included in my UndergroundJS keynote talk in August! 🌟
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Top comments (41)
Yup! I was a social media manager and pretty much disliked everything about it.
My wife was a teacher and she disliked that work also. She randomly fell into engineering thru a funny situation at a job fair she attended, and when I saw how much she liked it, I asked her to teach me some of the basics and then took those learnings and applied them to a bootcamp. Three years later, here I am!
I went from home health care to social media management to developer. My daughter has autism and needed to be homeschooled to make sure she had the best opportunity so I needed something I could do from home. That's where social media management came in. Then I heard about a boot camp in my area so I figured I would take her to see if she had any interest. She didn't and I did. So, here I am.
I just left 10 years of finance, the last 5 years of which as a professional adviser. I’m now a full time developer.
About 20 years ago I started learning Visual Basic, built basic websites, IRC scripts in mIRC and Eggdrop (in TCL), CGI scripts in Perl, more advanced websites in ASP, and currently PHP with a side plate of JavaScript, HTML, CSS.
Most projects I built were just for me but a few years ago I started building a full back-office system for my finance office, to automate tracking of clients, their products etc, so we didn’t miss repeat business, or fall behind on current business, could track KPIs, print reports, and so on.
I lost interest in finance and wanted to do something new but didn’t know what until I realised that throughout every job I’ve ever had, I was always developing something. I knew it would be difficult to find a new career as a developer but luckily I’d just spent over a year building a large admin system that I could use to prove to companies that while I had no commercial experience on my CV (resume), I did have provable code, so I created a demo copy with dummy data.
I’m now in my 5th month as a full time developer and really enjoying my change of career.
I went from the international education industry (as a product owner/project manager) and was fascinated by what the dev team was able to do to create our online courses for teachers to teach English abroad. If I asked them to completely reconfigure a part of the course, they could, and it was amazing! I was so impressed that they were able to constantly learn new technologies and that they were always solving interesting problems. They also took their role of fixing any bugs that came up very seriously - I new that their career and craft were important to them. I now am loving that I get to solve problems and learn new things every day.
I was a teacher. I did teaching for 9 years before I made the switch to tech. I fell out of love with it over the years and eventually realized teaching wasn't a good fit for me anymore. At first I had no clue what to do next. I took a break and did lots of self reflection to figure out what to do next. After doing this, I discovered Skillcrush and eventually wrote my first line of code. That first line of code transformed my life and inspired to make the career change into tech.
Yep, I was a fulltime musician for 15 yrs. and did the whole college thing (M.M. in Jazz Studies).
Started with freecodecamp, found it super interesting then NSS and have been writing code for a living for almost 2yrs now. I feel most days like it is too good to be true, working with smart folks, being creative, and making a great living.
I studied recreation management in college. While in school and after graduating I was a ropes course facilitator and camp counselor. I loved it, but I struggled to find full time work in the outdoor/adventure recreation space. After a few years of trying to figure out what I was going to do, I came across online courses for design and development. I spent a year using various online resources to teach myself to code. About a year later, I was hired for my first role as a developer. I have been in that role for just over a year now.
And you're a badass developer! So happy to have gotten the chance to work with you ❤️
Thank you! You are a badass as well and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from you this past year. You inspire me! :)
I worked in Film and TV as a Camera Assistant. Just got over the long work hours (out the house at 5:30am and would get home at 9:30pm) and pretentious people I was having to work with. Dropped everything and quit, and went travelling for 2 years. Decided to take up iOS Development. Got my first job this year! Much nicer life.
That’s awesome. Congrats on the new job!
Yep. I was originally a land surveyor. I started school for Civil Engineering - building bridges and dams and stuff. I quickly - with my professors' help - realized how little room for innovation there is in Civil. A bridge is a bridge, a dam is a dam. Euclid's Elements, ca. 300bc, are still the gold standard.
CompSci let me tap more into the "c'mon let's invent some stuff and be weird!!!" side of my brain.
Looking back, there was no option. I would be miserable now (15 years later) if I couldn't invent stuff and be wierd :)))
As a fellow land surveyor I found a more natural escape. I was mainly into photogrammetry and laser scanning and back in the first days of those technologies there was a huge lack of tools ...so I ended up building photogrammetry software then GIS and now for some reason I am in Telco 😛
I used to be an insurance clerk, but was bored of it and had little hope of career progression. I got into Linux in 2006, then started toying with Python and HTML, before deciding I wanted to be a web developer. Finally made the jump in 2011.