How I went from Actuarial to Engineering at Bowtie
Software engineers and actuaries are both commonly perceived as rationals, or, jokingly, as nerds. At Bowtie, I am lucky enough to have worked with and been a member of both groups of “nerds”. And here is a quick story of mine moving from actuarial to software engineering in the vibrant insurtech startup.
In case you are unfamiliar with “actuaries”: actuaries play a critical role, especially in the insurance industry, who manage and monitor various kinds of risks and price insurance products, ensuring claim payouts are still affordable even under adverse market situations. They act both as the brain and the gatekeeper of the insurer.
A positive identity crisis at Bowtie
As a typical actuarial graduate, I have gone through the capstone internship at a big insurer and entered the insurance sector like many others do. I joined the actuarial team of Bowtie a year and a half ago and embarked on an extraordinary journey. I told my manager I wanted to try something new and special and he really gave me a go — with some coding knowledge, I was involved in the Group Insurance design and development squad (aka “The Power Rangers”) — it was our first attempt to expand our business to offer well-rounded medical protection to SME’s.
That’s interesting! By that time I had nearly zero knowledge about software development (I probably knew what an API is, but hardly used any web frameworks or even git, to be very honest). Thanks to supervision by a patient enough senior software engineer, I managed to get things started and built tiny features for the project.
After the project I went back to the actuarial team to support analytics, data requests and automation functions. It was a fun role too as I served as the communication bridge between the two teams.
Jumping out and just do it
Approaching my first anniversary at Bowtie I started to revisit my career goal. I missed the days of being a member of the “Power Ranger” squad, where people sat down and discussed vigorously what features we should build and tapped new things magically out of the keyboard. I started to google more about software engineering, web development, etc, observed and talked to our fellow engineers — basically exploring the boundaryless world.
“Looks cool building stuff and solving real-life problems! Let’s try it out!” I told myself. In fact some engineers did encourage me to just go ahead and join them but I hesitated the other day as I found myself not technical enough, not having broad enough knowledge — plenty of excuses for myself to not jump out of the comfort zone and go for a less typical journey.
I mustered up the courage and told HR and my manager about my intention to take the challenge. To my great surprise, they showed real support with a clear “Why not!”, of course, followed by some discussions about my intention, my career path and resource allocation, etc. But the message is a general green light. The same went for the engineering side, where encouragement was given to my potential move. Indeed I felt encouraged to start paving the track to engineering. It was a significant milestone throughout my transition journey.
On my way becoming an engineer
Kicking off the four months of preparation for transition, I focused on the technicals. I started from the very fundamentals and looked for well-structured resources to follow along, which is my typical style of learning. Like many others, I joined one of the online bootcamps in the market and caught the morning glimpse and night breezes to follow the tutorials and crunched the challenges, basically forcing myself to learn something new every day.
Starting from the very basics of HTML and CSS, and all those beginner projects, the bootcamp did a great job brushing up my technical knowledge. While it is definitely not a perfect pathway bringing you to mastery, or building a SaaS product alike, it gave me a pretty good sense of what I should be learning. Of course bootcamping or LeetCoding won’t magically teach you how to become an engineer until you really dive into the workplace.
The true learning begins
So far so good. I officially joined the engineering team in July. Honestly I was pretty overwhelmed by how frequently colleagues mentioned issues, features, bugs, opportunities, epics, etc as I started to join various Slack channels of engineering — it was pretty easy to fall into the rabbit holes.
Luckily I am surrounded by talented people. Not only are they technically skilled, they also have the eagerness to pass on their knowledge and mentor juniors. Besides learning from my teammates how to write efficient Django queries and normalize tables properly, most importantly, I got more sense about prioritization of tasks, weighing trade-offs, stepping out for a bigger picture — these are soft skills that engineers in an ambitious startup should be equipped with and I am constantly picking up, beyond inverting a binary tree.
Another goodie I wasn’t expecting before joining the engineering team is the intensity of cross-team communication. I am grateful to be involved in a big cross-team meeting on Fridays, where teammates from Operations, Claims and Customer Service sit down and share the problems they have faced during the week and sometimes work out solutions together in a casual fashion. In this project cycle I even joined a diversified task force with design, underwriting and of course my teammates to work on a thrilling underwriting project, taking part in design sprint, listening to user stories, and discussing solutions. It was a valuable opportunity for me to practice explaining technicals and expressing ideas with friends from diversified backgrounds.
Perhaps this is what makes engineers in Bowtie less nerdy than the stereotypic IT guys with black-framed glasses.
You will never feel 100% ready when an opportunity arises. So just do it.
Looking back, I find the journey challenging and sometimes intimidating, but at least exciting, rewarding and unforgettable. I am thankful for everyone who has supported me and let this extraordinary story happen at Bowtie — and also buddies from both teams who have made me grow. We are expanding the vibrant and diversified team. If you are also looking for a career switch like me, or would like to build products that make insurance good again with talented people, (and of course, sitting in front of the screen for days looking for the culprit who is likely yourself), don’t hesitate, talk to us and apply now!
