Finding Needles in Haystack #5 | Ryan Cooper
This is the fifth interview for Finding Needles in Haystacks, where we interview people who have unconventional paths into startups and the tech world. One of Applied’s engineers sat down with Ryan Cooper to chat about failure, perseverance, and recruitment. Full disclosure, Ryan is an engineer at Applied. We think he has an interesting story to tell — especially for those aspiring engineers who think it might be ‘too late’ to get into the profession.
What’s your job title and what do you do on a normal day?
I’m a fullstack engineer at Applied. Sometimes you can be diving into some sticky issues and doing a really complex ticket. Other times it’s really nice and simple, like copy changes. Day to day we have a bunch of work and features to build. I’ve always enjoyed and been comfortable with knowing a little bit about a lot of things. So I jump into things and learn as I go rather than trying to get a deep level of knowledge before even starting. I don’t think I could find the motivation to become an absolute expert on something. My brain isn’t big enough to hold all that information so I have to fail a few times and come back and scratch my head before I feel I’m getting somewhere.
Scratch one’s head — isn’t that the recruitment criteria for what we do on a daily basis?
Yeah. I’m constantly reminded of this meme:
I read somewhere that being a developer can be tough because we’re constantly shown how wrong we are. All error messages we get when we do things can be perceived as negative feedback so we all have to adapt our mindset and expect a certain level of failure. But some days are like “nothing works or “I just don’t get it.” That’s when it’s time to speak to my colleagues, to get a fresh pair of eyes on something. I don’t think I could really work alone. It’s nice to have somebody else to lean on.
Given what you said earlier about a mindset that expects failure, do you think developers are better at handling rejections?
That’s interesting. I can see it both ways, I guess. I’ve met a handful of developers that had an unshakeable confidence in their own ability to code themselves out of a problem. They don’t ever feel rejection of any kind. But most of us probably have a constant element of self doubt. Generally, it just makes me plan a bit more — in real life too. But there’s always the worry of taking too long or failing to think about edge cases or not testing sufficiently.
How did you start out?
I wasn’t a technical person growing up. I had no interest in computers — I didn’t hate them, but they didn’t appeal to me. I studied history and psychology at university because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I messed up my exams. After that, I started applying to entry-level admin office jobs, thinking that I’d do that until I figured myself out. So I got a job in the civil service, answering phones and sending emails and letters and stuff. The computer system we had was terrible, it didn’t work. We had to do a lot of exporting to Excel and I thought, let me have a go at this. I became “that Excel guy” from messing around with it and while not true programming, it was something more technical. My interest really picked up when we eventually replaced that system with a new one. We had a company come in and they did things properly, gathering requirements from us and asking tons of things about our processes. It was really revelatory how they thought about problems and how developers from their side were involved in those sessions. They gave me a long and slow exposure to programming and in the end, I thought I might give it a go — despite being in my mid 20s and thinking that I was too old to switch careers.
You’re laughing at that now.. How did you go from there to where you are now?
I signed up for a module with Open University which took around 9 months. It taught Visual Basic .NET, which took me through things like data structures and how to connect to a database. I found it really difficult while doing my day job, which at that point didn’t have any real technical stuff for me to do. But I think it was just the right level of difficulty, and I did pass. That gave me a bit of confidence, and I had something to put on my CV and start applying for junior developer jobs. I thought I knew how to be a developer because I’d done my little module, but then I realised how much more there was to learn. It was like I thought I’d climbed the peak of a mountain, only to look up and realise that the actual peak was way above me. The problems I had to solve in my Open University module had been structured to have one right answer, but I realised pretty soon that there’s not one way of doing things and what’s right in one situation and one company may be wrong in another.
What kept you going when you understood how much further you had to go?
Growing up where I did, I’d seen a lot of people make a decent living up until their 30s but after that, they were stuck, unhappy in their jobs and couldn’t afford to move anywhere or do anything different. I didn’t want to be in that situation, I wanted to feel like I always had an option. And I think that even back then, I was aware that developers have been in demand for as long as I can remember. If you have some coding skills, you can work in lots of different places, and industries, solving lots of different problems. And let’s be honest, you can get paid quite well for doing it, which is always nice. So it ticked all the boxes for me and so I did feel that even if it was difficult I didn’t think about giving up. I certainly didn’t want to go back to working in the civil service and answering phones for the rest of my life.
If I say recruitment, what 5 words do you think of?
Recruiters. Living in England at least, and being a developer on LinkedIn, you get messaged a lot. As with all industries, some recruiters can be better than others. It can be quite stressful when you want to find a job and get pressured to go to interviews knowing that the role isn’t the right one for you. Remote. Covid has changed things, most likely for good. 3 or 4 years ago I’d tried remote working once and really didn’t enjoy it. Now I can’t imagine working any other way. Diversity, I think it comes up more now as a factor. I think Applied is the first place I’ve ever worked where there have been female engineers. Obviously, I’ve mostly worked in smaller places, so that’s not necessarily surprising. But it took 10 years before I worked in a team where having female engineers was the norm. Salary. People should not be allowed to write “competitive” as a salary when advertising a job, not for any industry. It’s a waste of people’s time and in my opinion the only reason you’re not disclosing the salary is because you hope people will work for less. Tiring. It takes a lot of time to find the right opportunity.
Final words of wisdom
Don’t ever think that [software engineering] is the preserve of people with huge brains or people with deep pockets. It’s not, it should be for everyone. And it’s never too late. I genuinely think that, age is definitely a factor, but supply and demand is such that there’s never been a better time to try it.
Don’t sweat too much about the theory. If you want to have a good, interesting career [in software engineering], you can get one without needing to be a high brow intellectual who lives and breathes computer science topics.
And if you’re worried about [the learning curve of] going into tech, you should read Dan Abramov’s blog post, where he freely admits to not knowing how to do certain things. He (Dan Abramov) is a very successful software engineer who has his name on software that millions of people use every day. And I know how to do some things that he doesn’t. So nobody knows everything.
