Making a Career Change After 17 Years: How Carlos Did It
Changing careers is never an easy decision. It requires a lot of thought, consideration, and discussion, often with your family or others involved in your life. Making a career change after 15+ years is an even harder choice. Do you want to start over? Are you ready for this? Is it too late?
These are questions Carlos Anriquez asked himself before making a career change after more than 17 years. He decided to give us his role as a manager working abroad, to move home and focus on his family and first love; programming.
Carlos Rafael Anriquez was an Electronics Engineer for 17 years before he decided to change careers and step into the software development world. We asked Carlos about his life experiences that led him to make the decision to become a web developer.
A 17 Year Career In Telecoms
After graduating as an Electronics Engineer, Carlos landed a job in the telecoms industry. He worked his way up from an intern, to becoming part of the corporate team. His job soon took him overseas, to the UK and Germany for 8 years, managing a team abroad before he ultimately decided to step back from the company and move home to Argentina for his family.
When he returned, he decided to take a course on Python. Working in managerial positions took Carlos away from the technological aspect of his work. So he decided to learn and help in his close-knit community in Salta, Argentina by using his coding knowledge. A friend of his asked him to work on a project building a web page and he accepted. He began to learn more about building web pages and took on more projects.
While having lunch one day, he saw a report on software development jobs stating that someone who had two years of experience working as a full stack developer was earning the same salary that he had after 16 years in the telecoms industry. Since he was already working on basic web development and enjoyed it, Carlos wanted to dive more into it. He joined Microverse in late 2019 to further develop his skills.
It’s Never Too Late To Learn New Skills
When Carlos first began his software development journey, he was 45 years old and changing careers after 17 years. Thanks to his HTML background, the journey was initially smooth but he soon faced challenges when he got to Ruby on Rails.
Carlos even faced imposter syndrome because of others’ progress vs his own pace. At 45, he said it’s impossible not to compare yourself to others. But Carlos learned to ignore those voices that give him doubt.
Carlos’ Most Valuable Learnings
“You can learn anything you want, and you just need to follow a process and get the materials.” That’s what Carlos said the most important thing he learned from Microverse is. He also noted, “And I realized how much I enjoy it, just to be here, keep learning and learn new technology. It’s like I’m back to my first love… So, I would say that that possibility is the mechanism, that process is the thing that I think Microverse has provided me and I recognize as the most valuable one.”
In this day and age, when knowledge is at the tip of our fingertips, anything is possible. However, Carlos noted that it’s difficult to know where to start and what the process is. With Microverse, everything is laid out for you.
“To have a mechanism to learn anything you want to learn, Microverse presents us with a curriculum that you trust based on how you study the market and the best chances we have to get a job.”
Landing a Job With Honesty
Before he made his decision, Carlos didn’t have experience in coding or software development. His previous experiences were in engineering so he had a lot to learn technically before interviewing. That said, he had developed his soft skills over the past 17 years of his career, which would come in handy when interviewing.
Carlos followed the Microverse curriculum to better prepare for interviews and landing a job, as well as to brush up on his online presence and soft skills.
After applying for jobs for about three weeks, Carlos received an interesting offer to work for a company where a fellow Microverse alum worked. The company asked him to do a take-home project for a Senior Full Stack Developer to test his skills. Carlos shared, “They gave me 24 hours to take APIs from the company and to build anything I want with those APIs, and to actually come up with something new that they don’t have in their current solution.”
It took him 22 hours but it wasn’t enough to complete the project. Carlos wanted to be transparent, so he let the company know that it wasn’t enough time to complete the project. He was surprised when the company replied saying they too realized 22 hours wasn’t enough for the project and gave him an additional 20 hours to work on it.
“That was unusual for me because none of the other companies that I was applying for at that time were doing stuff like that,” he said in disbelief.
Throughout the screening process, there were a lot of things to be clarified. There were many processes to be done and deadlines to meet. Carlos was honest in communicating with the hiring manager about the time needed and in giving explanations for his code.”You need to give honest answers — that keeps you in the process and that is what worked for me.”
Carlos eventually progressed through the application process and was offered a remote job at that company, working alongside one of his Microverse colleagues. He is delighted to be working with another Microverse alum, and learning on the job.
Advice for Aspiring Web Developers
Through programming, Carlos has rediscovered his love for electronics and technology.
“I love technology but since I moved to management positions, I somehow lost touch with that. And if you love technology, you should not allow for that to happen. I think that it’s important for you to be all the time up to date.”
From all his gathered experience learning, Carlos focused on the process. Trust the process, he insisted. Even with the setbacks, you need to get going and let things happen.
“You just need to keep pushing. Keep pushing. Just go back to it. Maybe find another source of information and go back to it. Try to find another angle to understand the concepts. But once you do, it’s magic.”
Another thing he added is to seek out feedback on your code. He suggested thinking of it as an opportunity to learn more. Finally, he said, “Just go for it and just continue if you are in the middle. Trust the process and you will do just fine.”
Through a lot of hard work, focus, and dedication, Carlos was able to successfully transition to programming and landed a job as a remote software developer in late 2020.
Originally published at https://www.microverse.org.
