Changing Careers: Becoming a Developer
Do you want to hear about two success stories of people who decided to become developers?
As many of you know, becoming a developer or software engineer is a highly desirable career these days. You have probably seen the highly marketed college degrees, bootcamps and online courses that state you can learn the basics and land a job making $60k–80k. The crazy thing is, it’s not a far fetched idea.
My wife and I both changed careers in 2016 and 2014 respectively. We were both stuck in jobs that were less than desirable. We saw an income cap, high stress, and lack of excitement within our roles. Both of us were highly motivated individuals, well educated in our fields, but we were overall lost in our career paths.
I was a manager of a call center (least fun thing ever). Utilizing my business degree, I was helping to oversee a number of call center employees, who were all working in entry level careers. I too entered as one of these entry level employees and grew through the ranks and received multiple promotions; however, I was beginning to quickly reach a cap in career progression and losing hope on what my future would hold.
My wife was a P.E. teach for an elementary school. She was working with ~45 young kids at any given time. You might think that a P.E. teaching career could be fun and energizing, but we found it to be energy draining and highly stressful.
Needless to say, both of us were unhappy in our careers. I liked the mission of my company and the people around me, but my day-to-day activities were mundane and stressful. My wife enjoyed her summer and winter vacations as a teacher, but that was about all she looked forward to each year.
We both decided not to settle in our jobs. Instead, we realized that our potential and career paths were our own responsibility. Being “normal” and accepting our 9–5 jobs was not going to be our mentality.
Fortunately for me, my job was at a university that had a degree which focused on mobile development. After some deep and heart felt conversations with my wife, we decided that I’d take on the challenge of changing careers and become a developer. This was probably the most impactful decision I made that changed the trajectory of my career.
We both worked full time during my degree. She continued as a P.E. teacher, and I worked full time at the university call center. The course work was extremely challenging, but also very productive. Within the timeframe of my degree, I found myself developing multiple applications on the app store, gaining an immense amount of understanding of software development, and finding myself invigorated with the idea of a new career.
In roughly three years, I found myself transitioning from a managerial role making $55k to a junior iOS developer making $59k. Take this in for a moment…I changed careers where I felt a sense of being capped in my income and career progression, to a new career where I was considered entry level making MORE money than in my managerial role. CHA-CHING!
By this time, my wife was beyond frustrated in her job. We had just had our first child who was a premature baby and who needed our support. My wife was struggling with being a new mom and going to a job that left her drained and unmotivated. It was easy to see she needed a change.
After another round of deep and heart felt conversations with my wife, we decided that she would no longer be a teacher. She resigned and came home to take care of our son while she figured out the next step in her career. At this time, the idea that she would become a developer was just a faint notion.
Within a few months of her leaving her career, she knew she needed to find her next career move. Seeing how happy I was in my development job and thinking that she could also take the leap into development, she began exploring development concepts on her own. She looked at free, as well as inexpensive, online courses where she could learn the basics of development. As we approached the end of 2015 and after a lot of research, we decided that she would take a three month web development bootcamp in Orlando.
After three grueling months of 70+ hour workweeks, my wife completed her bootcamp. It was not even remotely easy, and she even felt hopeless at times. The concepts were so different than anything she had ever done, but she was not willing to give up. In one of her classes, her teacher asked her why she wanted to become a developer. Her response was, “Because I didn’t want to work at Wal-Mart.” This was obviously a joke on the truth, but the fact was, she didn’t want to have a mediocre career. After a few months of job searching, my wife landed a job as a front-end web developer making ~$45k (~$6k–7k more than her teaching job). Again it was an entry level job, but paying higher than her previous job where she had a degree and years of experience.
At this point, our income had increased slightly (~10k), but the difference was that we were at the bottom of the industry’s career ladder and we only had an upward trajectory.
To say that becoming a developer has cured all of my career anxieties would be a lie. My wife and I have jumped around to a few jobs (more me than her). I hopped around partly due to a desire to gain more knowledge and partly to remove myself from some concerning situations, but also because the industry rewards job hopping with fairly large pay increases early in a developer’s career. My wife hopped around less for the money and more because she knew there was a better opportunity available.
Looking back to when our development careers started, I can confidently say that my wife and I made the best decisions of our careers by making the transitions. Over the past five years, I have been able to move up into a Sr. Developer role as well as a manager role above developers. My wife has also progressed in her career to become an amazing Full-Stack Web Developer. We are both far more happy with our schedules and the flexibility our jobs offer, and our stress levels are much lower. To say we don’t have stress would be a lie, but our stress levels are far better than in our previous careers. We have also found ourselves traveling more, enjoying life more, and thinking about our future in a more positive way. Our income has grown from ~$90k prior to becoming developers to ~$200k in the past 6 years. Financial stress is no longer an issue in our life. To add to that, we have yet to hit a cap in our income potential, and we continue to get stock options, raises, and bonuses each year.
Final Thoughts
I am of the mindset that if you want to have a positive change in your life, you need to be the one to step up and make it happen. Through perseverance, self-determination, and good old-fashion hard work, you can make a career change that can really impact your life.
With that said, becoming a developer is not something that will be suited for everyone. Being a software engineer is very challenging, and it requires you to be a student for life. If you are a growth minded individual who loves challenging and cutting edge work, I would highly recommend that you look into become a developer. Checkout Udemy, Udacity, Pluralsight, or simply YouTube, and start looking into ways that you can begin to learn how to code. The great news is that many development jobs these day pay great money and don’t require a degree. Your knowledge, attitude towards learning, ability to problem solve, and a portfolio of work is all you need to showcase to a potential employer.
