For a while now, I have wanted to write about the journey I have taken in the past year. I aim to write about how I experienced the career change from being a consultant for a SAAS insurance software company, to becoming a developer and landing my first job. Therefore, I will divide this article into several sections.
Background
My interest in computers started at a very young age. Of course, it all started with video games on the trusted Nintendo Entertainment System and it quickly developed into PC use. Although I mostly enjoyed playing games, I had always been curious about how it all works “under the hood”.
Being a rather average student during high school, I never really felt like I could get into IT. I was really bad at math and believed I would not be able to manage. In addition, there were not a lot of options at the time, since our high school computer classes consisted mostly of the Office suite. In my free time I messed around a bit with Dreamweaver and built some really simple stuff but never got much further than that.
When I was 20, I moved to Ireland with the goal of pursuing third level education (a bachelor degree). I attended Dundalk Institute of Technology, and the program I enrolled in was called 'Business Information Systems' which did have a little bit of programming, in Visual Basic 2005. Again, this did not really pull me in and I struggled a bit with it. It was also only 1 module out of many modules so we did not spend a lot of time on it.
During university I met my now wife, who is Swedish, so I decided to enroll in a Master program at Stockholm University. The program I enrolled in was called Strategic IT Management, which seemed like a natural follow-up to the BIS program I took. During our first semester we had a Java course. Although I managed to pass it, I definitely needed some help from a friend explaining concepts. The classes were really subpar unfortunately, which again didn’t help to hold my interest.
After graduating I moved back to the Netherlands (with my wife) in order to try and set up a company in digital marketing with a friend, focused on the small and medium business segment. After about a year, it didn't really seem to be working out so we decided to stop and I started looking for a job.
I worked for a tech company for around 9 months, where I got a little bit bored since I was only training but there were no projects for me to work on.
Following this I joined a SAAS insurance software company where I worked as a consultant. My job there mostly consisted of implementing logic into our software and also writing technical documentation to support the client. This was a fairly satisfying job, and I learned a lot while working there.
I ended up moving back to Sweden to work from the Swedish office so I could be with my wife again (we lived between the Netherlands and Sweden for 3 years or so), and the SE office was significantly smaller. After a while I became unhappy with the lack of people around, and noticed I only really went to work for the pay check.
Decision to change career
I started thinking about what I wanted to do and if I wanted to stay in the same field. I bought a web development bootcamp on Udemy and tried to work on it during evenings and weekends while working a full-time job. I really did enjoy it, and it is really fun to see results of what you are doing immediately. However, I could not be consistent enough, and would often need to check “what was it that I was doing again?” if I continued a project I hadn’t worked on for a week. In order to really understand this, I needed to do code full time.
Around the end of November of 2019, we were informed that our office would be closed down in early 2020 as the focus shifted to other countries instead of Sweden. I had already applied to a “free” coding bootcamp, where no prior experience was required, but the competition was really high here (1500 applicants for 30 slots, and they seemed to prefer IT graduates). I did not get in, but I did stumble upon another bootcamp that was going to run for the first time in 2020 in Sweden. It would start in February, and my last working day was January 31st, it nearly felt like it was meant to be!
Coding Bootcamp
The bootcamp I ended up attending was Le Wagon’s Full-Stack Web Development Bootcamp. For people not familiar, Le Wagon is a bootcamp provider originating from Paris, and from the research I did before joining, they had so many good ratings, and I could find so little negativity, that it nearly felt too good to be true. After having attended the bootcamp though, I can really say it was a super positive experience for me.
The program starts off with around 60 hours of prep work for some basics before you even start the bootcamp. Then it is 9 weeks of full time learning and working. The structure is probably quite common where you have some lectures in the morning, and then spend the rest of the day coding exercises about the topic of the day. The learning material was being updated even while we were in the course, and the Slack channel available still is a very nice source of information and discussion. If you are curious about the curriculum, you can check Le Wagon's Curriculum.
The main language we worked with was Ruby and later on the Rails framework to work “Full Stack”. Although there are not many job prospects in my region for Ruby developers, I do think it was a really nice language to learn to code. The syntax is quite “natural” and it was really nice to see that a lot of the concepts carry over between different languages.
My ‘batch’ of students was relatively small, which was to be expected since it was the first time the bootcamp was held in Sweden, and we were people from a lot of different backgrounds. In a way I think we were really fortunate that we were such a small group, because this allowed us to get pretty personal instruction when we had questions!
Every day, you work with a buddy on a rotating schedule, so you get to know and work with a lot of people from your batch. This was really great as during the course of the bootcamp, there were a lot of ups and downs for me in terms of motivation, and having people around to play intense matches of ping pong with in order to blow off some steam was great, and really added to the experience.
I think it was just before the project weeks started that we had to switch to remote learning because of the pandemic starting in Sweden. This was a point of worry for many of us, as we were unsure how this would impact our learning experience. Being remote, combined with doing our first “group project” was quite intense but overall a pretty realistic experience. The first week we had to build an Airbnb clone, which you can check out check here (please give the site a while to load up, it is on Heroku’s free tier so it can take around 30 seconds to load.. 😊). This was a difficult challenge as we had not collaborated much on GitHub yet. It took some time to figure out how it all worked, but we got through it, especially with the help of our amazing teachers.
The final project that we ended up having to present was called Travelworms. After this presentation, our bootcamp was completed. We still connected on Slack to do some work on our projects, and to stay in touch. I think the Slack community is one of the points that is highly undersold in the bootcamp pitch, but it is very valuable. People always seem willing to help.
(The batch I was a part of, I'm the tall guy in the back :P)
Job hunt and continued learning during a pandemic
So there I was, with a bunch of new skills. My idea was to rest for a few days and then continue learning while looking for jobs. Unfortunately, I was sick for around 5 weeks after my bootcamp ended so that got postponed a bit. But from May I started applying for jobs, and boy, did I underestimate how long it would take to find a job.
While I was looking for jobs, I continued with the Udemy bootcamp I had bought before starting the Le Wagon one. The online one, which you can see here, had a bit more focus on JavaScript so I figured that would help me get to a job faster as there were a lot of JS vacancies in my area.
I mostly looked for jobs on LinkedIn, but used several other platforms too such as Demando, WeTal, Glassdoor and TheHub.
Before landing a job, I had applied to over 85 vacancies. This resulted in 6 interviews, of which 2 were because of networking. I think one of the most frustrating parts was that a lot of the rejections are so impersonal. There is no feedback on why you are rejected so you can’t really know what you should change or work on. This of course only applied when there was in fact any communication at all. Just over 50% of the jobs I applied to had no response whatsoever.
I don’t know about you, but for me it was difficult to stay motivated as time progressed. I enjoyed coding during the days, but it is really demotivating to spend a few hours researching and reading about a company and customizing a cover letter for an application, only to receive a generic rejection. What I ended up doing is creating a template cover letter where I could swap certain parts in and out to make the process a bit less draining.
Another thing I found was that I couldn’t even find a lot of joy in playing video games to relax. Every time I would play for longer than an hour, I’d feel guilt because I should be looking for a job instead, or learning to increase my chances of finding a job. These kinds of thoughts together with the inability to really do anything relaxing (vacation etc) because of a pandemic are not very good for your mental health.
I got approached by plenty of recruiters who offered me all sorts of senior developer roles. In the start I actually thought they would be open to juniors but as soon as they found out, I usually just did not hear back from them again. It is a bit of a ‘catch 22’ in the sense that so many companies are looking for senior developers, but at the same time are unwilling or unable to hire juniors. I realize juniors cost more resources, but without them getting experience, there won’t be more seniors.
In November I had the opportunity to work for a company as an intern. This was one of the interviews I got through networking, it was not an advertised position. Here I got to work with React and Django. I had done a coding test for them in Django which was the first time I really used Python. I had been using React for a little while, and I also used it to build my portfolio page.
It was an interesting experience for sure, but unfortunately, I didn’t get as much support as I maybe needed and would have liked, and at the end of the month we agreed I’d work there, I was told I could not be offered a position at the moment which I fully understood.
During the course of November, because I was working with Django, I became more interested in Python and decided to pick up yet another Udemy course. This course actually ended up giving me the confidence to build a project which led to my job (I had built plenty of things before, but I wasn’t always super confident in how everything functioned). I’m a big fan of how Angela from the App Brewery teaches, and I mostly bought this Python course because I was so satisfied with the Web Development course.
The application for the job I eventually got was pretty random, and on a platform where you don’t need to write any cover letter or CV. I ended up just having a conversation with someone from the company and it clicked well, so then I got sent a technical test which was a lot of fun actually. The assignment was to build something in around 5 to 10 hours utilizing the GitHub API, so it was really open.
What I ended up building can be found here. After the code was checked, I had a technical interview with 2 developers where I had to explain my code and make some changes while live-coding. The whole process went so quickly, and there was a lot of communication about what the next steps would be, that even if I would not have gotten an offer, I would have provided them with positive feedback around their recruiting process. I really think a lot of other companies would do well to adopt similar processes.
Tomorrow will be the first day, and I am both excited and scared (imposter syndrome is an issue for many developers I hear!). It is a very exciting step, especially that looking back just over a year ago, I didn’t even know how to code. If you are currently in a situation where you are attempting a switch into tech, and you are down on your motivation, try and look back to the start of your coding journey. I think you are likely to see the growth if you compare yourself now, to when you started.
As for the job search, I think there is a disconnect between recruiters and technical hiring managers. I tried to build projects and have the code on GitHub, but at the end of the day I am not even sure if that matters unless you get an interview, as I am not sure that recruiters look at it (unless they are technical).
I think my main takeaway from my experiences is that it is a numbers game. I applied to the right job at the right time and got lucky enough to get an interview. Therefore, I would encourage you to keep sending out applications, and network with people, either through tech meetings or through LinkedIn.
I hope that if you managed to read this all, it helped you in some way. If you have any comments or questions feel free to hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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