I left journalism for tech … and I use all the same skills
Years ago, a male friend told me a story about going to coding camp as a kid.
I don’t remember the actual story. I’m sure there was a point to it. The only thing I remember is thinking, “I would have LOVED coding camp.”
No one in my life knew that was a thing. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. My parents and teachers always treated me like I was god’s gift to math, to the point that I grew up largely unaware that there was, and remains, a stereotype about boys being better at STEM.
But in a small town in the 90s, tech wasn’t particularly on anyone’s radar. My friends and I played with dolls, not computers. So it kind of just … never came up.
Instead, growing up, I always fancied myself first and foremost a writer. As it turned out, my way with words would serve me well. It just would take a while to figure out how.
In college I majored in French and Spanish; I minored in English; I took a semester of Italian just for kicks. And then I graduated and went into print journalism.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but newspapers are not the BEST place to be working these days.
I worked as a copy editor at a small hometown paper upstate. I did the 4 to midnight shift, Friday through Tuesday, for approximately $12 an hour. Each quarter, a few more of my coworkers got laid off. I could have been next at any moment — I definitely would have been at some point — and in the meantime, the already impossible workload just kept getting more ridiculous as it got distributed amongst fewer and fewer people.
One night, as we waited for the presses to run so we could double check everything and go home, I thought to myself, “You know, I’ve always been good at math. I’ve always liked math. So what am I actually doing here?”
And I sat down at my desk and googled “careers that use math.”
Seriously.
I had always kind of thought that the options for math careers were accountant or, like, math teacher. It’s pretty hard to even comprehend that mindset now, but in 2009, coding wasn’t sexy yet. There were no bootcamps. I still had a flip phone … and that wasn’t weird.
So I’m sitting there googling “careers that use math” and one thing that kept coming up was computer science. I didn’t even really know what that meant. Like, ones and zeros? RAM? Being able to fix my mom’s printer?
I was great at using computers, like any good millennial, but the idea of programming one had always seemed so daunting and opaque as to be hardly worth considering. But that night in the newsroom, I started reading up on computer science, and I realized, “Huh, I could do that.” Or at least, “I could learn to do that.”
At the time, I naively assumed I’d need a CS degree in order to get into the field. I knew there was no way I could get into a master’s program having never written a line of code in my life, so I figured that meant I’d need a second bachelor’s.
Again, it sounds crazy NOW.
I started my first semester, but fortunately, a friend who had recently gotten into the field himself convinced me I did not need to finish that degree. I spent the month-long winter break teaching myself HTML and CSS, and was somehow able to find an internship for the following semester despite knowing legitimately nothing. Over the summer I got another internship — this one was paid, if minimally — and from there was able to land my first dev job. It paid $45k and I felt obscenely wealthy.
(For the record, entry-level dev jobs these days generally pay more like $70 or $80k. It was a different time.)
Frequently when I tell someone about my background, they will ask, surprised, “So how did you go from languages to code?”
But code IS language. There’s an entire grammar to each programming language. There’s a fluency that arrives after years of using it all day every day, in which you stop having to translate everything in your head and can start to think in it. You nearly always benefit from writing an outline first, then a draft, before you get down to the final version. The maxim “Write drunk, edit sober” also applies to code.
So does this:
The ability to communicate effectively is huge, and grossly undervalued, in tech.
There’s this pervasive misconception that people skills aren’t necessary in this industry … but it IS a field that frequently attracts people who lack them. If you can communicate, it sets you apart in a big way.
I have no qualms about saying that I am rarely the most senior developer in the room. What I am, frequently, is the person in the room who can communicate. I’m the person who can reframe the problem and refocus the discussion. I’m the person who can keep a team motivated and productive.
These are the EQ skills, the “soft skills,” and they are primarily what’s gotten me promoted into management. And they’re not that different from the skills you need as a journalist. They just pay a lot better.
The more time I spend in this field, the more I realize how much it needs people with soft skills. This does not inherently mean women, but it generally involves feminine-coded communication styles. We need people who can shape the conversation, not just churn out code.
We need people who recognize that this industry is changing the very fabric of our world, and we have a huge responsibility to get it right.
As tech becomes an ever more powerful part of our lives, our relationships, ourselves, it would behoove us to place a little more value on the humanity that lies beneath it.
In the end, the individual lines of code won’t mean much. The way they come together to shape the future will.
