Breaking Down the Door

In 2022, I was 26 and working for a major grocery store chain. I had been there for more than five years, two of them as a manager. The pay wasn't great, and the work was tiring, even after a recent raise brought me to $23 an hour. Still, it worked for me at the time.

I had been in the workforce since I was 15, mostly working retail and odd jobs. I dropped out of high school because of a difficult home life, and unfortunately, my studies were the last thing on my mind. In 2015, I earned my GED and took a few community college courses, but for the most part, I continued working full-time.

Eventually, those full-time hours turned into 50-plus-hour weeks for slightly above-average, yet still mediocre, pay.

"This is probably how I'm going to spend the rest of my life," I remember thinking.

The strange thing was, I had skills elsewhere.

I had been tinkering with computers since I was a teenager. I taught myself enough Visual Basic to start building my own GUI applications, and technology had always interested me. But despite that interest, I never seriously considered pursuing it as a career.

There were a few reasons for that.

Math was NEVER my strong suit. It still isn't, says the English major in me. Taking remedial math classes in community college had pretty much closed that chapter in my mind. Equations? Stay far away.

What I didn't realize was that I'd allowed my fear of math to quietly close the door on a lot of things I was genuinely interested in. Computers were one of them.

I knew I wanted to do something with technology. I just didn't know what.

Fast-forward six months. 2022 was almost over, and I was at my wit's end. I felt overworked and underpaid, and I knew there had to be other options for me. That's not a criticism of the people who were perfectly content with the routine of retail. I simply wasn't anymore.

So I started doing some research.

"Tech jobs with no experience"

"How to get into tech"

Queries like those filled my Google search history. Lunch breaks turned into job searches. I looked everywhere I could for something that might be my way out.

Then my dad recommended a program he'd seen featured on 60 Minutes.

I won't disclose the name of the program, but it was essentially a boot camp designed to teach people how to code and prepare them for a job with little to no prior experience, completely free of charge. There was a catch, of course. You had to pass a series of tests to get in, and if you were accepted, you signed a contract committing to the program for a certain amount of time. From there, they placed you with companies they had agreements with.

At the time, I figured my odds of even passing the entrance tests were slim. But I also had nothing to lose, so I applied.

The tests weren't especially difficult, but they weren't easy either. What surprised me was that they focused less on raw arithmetic and more on problem-solving and critical thinking.

They weren't necessarily interested in what I already knew. They wanted to know how I thought.

That distinction mattered to me.

For years, I'd associated intelligence in technology with the things I wasn't good at, especially math. This was one of the first times I began to see that the skills I'd developed elsewhere might actually have a place in tech.

Problem-solving. Communication. Critical thinking. Learning quickly.

I had spent years developing those skills without realizing they might be exactly what could get my foot in the door.

I answered the final question on the exam and hit submit. A few days later, an email arrived.

I'd passed.

Wow.

I remember staring at it in disbelief. I never would've imagined something like this happening to me. Me? Someone who had spent years thinking he didn't have what it took to work in technology? Now I was being told I had what it took to become a software developer.

It answered a question I'd never really allowed myself to ask.

Could I actually do this?

That same week, I put in my two weeks' notice at the grocery store.

I swear I could see the tears forming in my manager's eyes when I told him. He was already short-staffed. Two other managers were leaving, and I was in the middle of training their replacements.

It was probably the worst possible time for me to leave.

I couldn't leave.

But I had to.

So I explained why.

Learning to Code

A few months passed, and I was halfway through the training. I now knew what a daily standup was, and I could refactor a function in JavaScript.

I was on top of the world.

At least, for a little while.

Slowly, the technical side of everything started pushing me back down. Learning to code was HARD, and there were days when I felt like I was drowning. Keeping up with the rest of the class, passing test modules, learning new concepts, and then immediately applying them became overwhelming.

I had the soft skills, but I was clearly lacking in technical proficiency.

Funny enough, I figured the opposite was probably true for some of the people around me.

Still, there was something important happening underneath all that frustration.

I was learning.

Things that would've looked like complete nonsense to me a few months earlier were beginning to make sense. Not always quickly, and definitely not easily, but they were making sense.

And for the first time, being bad at something didn't automatically convince me that I wasn't supposed to be doing it.

Breaking Down the Door, Again

When I first tried to get into tech in 2022, I thought the biggest thing standing between me and becoming a developer was everything I didn't know.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Four years later, I'm finding myself in a strangely familiar position. I'm learning again. I'm uncomfortable again. And once again, I'm looking at an industry that seems to be moving faster than I can keep up with it.

Except this time, there's AI.

The tools are different. The job market is different. The expectations are different. Some of the things I spent hours learning four years ago can now be generated in seconds with a prompt.

It's easy to look at all of that and wonder where you fit.

Can I still do this?

But I've realized that's almost the same question I was asking myself in 2022.

Could I actually do this?

Back then, I thought becoming a developer meant eventually reaching some imaginary point where I knew enough to belong. Now I don't think that point exists.

Technology changes. Languages change. Tools change. The way we write software changes.

You either keep learning or you don't.

AI hasn't really changed that.

If anything, it has made the ability to think critically, communicate, solve problems, and learn unfamiliar things even more important to me. Those were the skills that got my foot in the door when I barely knew how to code. They're also the skills I'm relying on now as I try to find my place in tech again.

I don't know exactly where that will lead me this time.

And strangely enough, I'm okay with that.

In 2022, I learned that the door wasn't locked.

In 2026, I'm learning that there was never just one door.