Owning your career path: From Tax Ops to Tech

In this post, hear from software engineer Manja Badel who changed her position from taxes to tech, and learn why it was the right decision for her. Read about her story, how she stayed motivated, the courses she took, and the support she received from her peers and team during the process.

Before joining the Tax Operations team in 2019, I worked in one of the Big Four firms for a couple of years. The way I got into taxes was, in a way, by accident when I got assigned to do my bachelor thesis in the taxes department of my university. And then I really started to like it, finished my studies in that area, and began to work in that field. After working in a tax advisory company for a few years, I realized that the traditional career path of becoming a tax advisor doesn’t suit me. At that point, I was already interested in tech, but I only had work experience in taxes, and I wasn’t ready at that time to work in a totally unrelated field. Fortunately, at Taxfix, I could use my previous experience in taxes and, at the same time, get to know the tech industry better. After a few successful years on the tax side at Taxfix, I decided to move to tech. In this post, I’ll tell the story around this transition and hopefully show that development doesn’t always have to look like climbing up– it can also be sideways.

The difference to working in big corporations

At my previous company, my clients were companies, and the focus was on international taxation, whereas at Taxfix, our customers are individual people, which really makes a difference to me. It felt more rewarding to see that our app helps a person do their tax return; now, this person may have one less problem in their life.

It’s also different in terms of the atmosphere. I started at Taxfix when it was still a small start-up, and the start-up mentality and atmosphere still exist. Taxfix has always been very open to new ideas, challenging what is, trying out new things, and learning from failure. At more established and bigger companies, there’s usually the approach to avoid mistakes and failures, but at the same time, it limits people in trying new things. There’s also more opportunity to work cross-functional at Taxfix. Many projects I worked on involved different teams like product, data, marketing, and many more. It allowed me to get insights into various topics, and workflows and see how ideas and plans affect different teams.

Additionally, there isn’t anything like mandatory time tracking at Taxfix, which you usually find at a regular tax advisory company. This significantly reduces the pressure. Instead, we have status updates where we’re tracking progress, so we can think about how to adjust processes, improve workflows and remove blockers. The aim is to make things easier and remove obstacles because we want to find ways to enable each other. It’s an important mental switch.

Change into tech

There wasn’t really one specific moment which made me realize that I want to go into tech. It was more of a gradual process. After I met people who really have a passion for taxes, I noticed that this doesn’t apply to me. And then I started thinking about what I would rather do. At that time, I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do. The only thing I knew was it was something else. So I decided to leave my previous company and take a six-month break for myself. During this six-month period, I completed a data analyst course that involved programming in Python because I was interested in the topic. In the beginning, it was tough, but by the end, I enjoyed doing it. The six months were running out, and I had finished the course, but I didn’t feel ready to take a job in that field. That’s when the call from Taxfix came to join their Tax Operations team — and the rest is history.

I was still working in taxes, nevertheless I had more options to work on other projects or with other teams. For example, our team realized that we slowly needed more and more information from our data team. In the beginning, the analyses were purely done by them. But when they noticed I was interested in this topic, they showed me how to do this. They helped me set up my computer and provided insights into how certain parts are structured in our database. With their help and the data course I had done, I started to do most data analyses and data related tasks for our team. Whenever there was a problem to be solved, I could just get the information from the database myself and support my team.

Although I enjoyed working with data, I became more interested in another topic. I took over the bug reporting for the Tax Operations team, and I really loved doing this. Whenever there’s a technical issue, it needs to be reported to our developers to resolve it. That’s what I was taking care of. It was fascinating because I learned how systems interact with each other. Because of that, I also got to know more about how developers work, and that’s when I started thinking that it’s something I would like to do as well.

Last January, I decided to do a part-time tech bootcamp. During that time, I realized I wanted to be a developer and would love to code all day. That’s when I finally decided to pursue a career in tech. When the bootcamp ended, I was ready to explore my chances within Taxfix. So I reached out to a colleague from our DevOps team, who I knew had previously switched teams. They pointed me to our People team, who were really excited about it, and soon enough, I had a pair programming interview session.

How to stay motivated

For me, it was relatively easy to keep the motivation high to complete the bootcamp. The course happened on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30 to 9:30 pm and the whole day on Saturdays. After the first two weeks, it became a routine. Since I did the boot camp while everything was still in lockdown, the course itself was done remotely, so everyone joined a virtual meeting, and then the teams would split into different meeting rooms. And the more we progressed in the course, the more I enjoyed it. We started working on projects as a team and had to think about what our web application would look like, design it, structure the databases and implement the backend. Usually, we spent extra hours because we wanted to finish a specific feature or fix what wasn’t working. But we really had a lot of fun doing it.

Similarities between taxes and tech

I think there are several similarities when I compare taxes with programming. Both taxes and coding are based on a set of rules. For taxes, the rules are the tax law, and for coding, it’s the specifics of the programming language, e.g., you need to write a function in a certain way; otherwise, the program won’t understand what you mean.

Both are structured in a way that doesn’t necessarily appear intuitive from the outside perspective. For example, taxes for corporations are stated in the corporate tax law but not only there. The trade tax law also imposes taxes on corporations. One might wonder why the legislator didn’t put all taxes for corporations in the corporate tax law, but at some point, it was more efficient to create a separate one. Coding is quite similar. You have repositories consisting of several folders and subfolders which in the end contain the actual files. Not everything that belongs together is necessarily in the same file. Again, this is done to improve usage and efficiency.

Both are also about seeing the process as a whole and thinking about optimization. In taxes, if a tax advisor has a client, the goal is to optimize the tax structure and ensure the client only pays as few taxes as necessary. You need to understand the client’s circumstances and figure out which tax laws apply and how you can optimize them. And, of course, you need to find a way to explain this complex matter to your client who doesn’t have the same tax knowledge. Coding is very similar, the only difference is you’re writing code. You have a problem to solve with this code or a feature you want to implement. And you have to think about what the whole process looks like. Does it affect other teams? Is there a better way to code this? How can I write it so that it’s easy to understand for other developers? How can I make it easy to maintain for someone who maybe has no idea about this?

With both coding and taxes, the goal is to optimize as much as possible and think about how you can do it, so others easily understand it. They both have this approach, and ultimately they’re both service-oriented.

Advice for career changers

If you’re looking to change careers, I would say, just try it. You don’t have to change your career from one day to another, and you can do it slowly on your terms. I was working on projects with different teams and slowly increasing the range of tasks I did. I learned that I wouldn’t get tired of coding every day, and I talked to other developers in the company to figure out what they do on a daily basis. And when I felt ready, I asked for the transition. It’s okay if it takes time.

In the best case, you will create a beautiful new career path and you’re very happy with the work you do. And in the worst case — you’ll gain experience. Yes, maybe not the kind of experience you were looking for in the first place, but you can still learn from that. Maybe you realize you don’t like having business trips each week but only once in a while. Or you prefer a start-up environment instead of a more settled company.

For me, taxes were an interesting and important experience that helped me develop a lot through the years. When I changed teams, it felt like closing a chapter that was complete. I have a lot of other interests. To be honest, I don’t know if in 10 years I’m still going to be an engineer or find something else to do. But I would always advise people to just try it and have no regrets in the future for not trying it.

What it’s like to work at Taxfix

Currently, I’m working with the payments platform team as a junior software engineer. I already knew I wanted to be in a backend role during the interview, and I decided to join the payments team after the interview process. Since I’ve been with the company for a few years, I already knew most people from the team. In the beginning, I had a buddy who would help me get started and get familiar with the code base. He’s great, he knows a lot of things and is always super patient with me and answers any questions I have. And I had a lot of questions. The team is fantastic and very supportive. Everybody is always willing to help, and at the same time, we can also have challenging discussions about technical implementations. I’m very happy to be part of the team.

Taxfix is truly an international company. This is one of the big advantages of the company. You get to know people from all corners of the world with different experiences. It’s a very exciting environment. Everybody has different perspectives and ideas on how problems can be tackled. And sometimes someone is showing how this specific issue is solved in their country or their previous company, and you’re thinking, oh, that’s such a genius way of doing it.

Another thing is that Taxfix is a place with many opportunities to work cross-functionally and explore your options, e.g., with changing departments as I did. And this is not something that happened only once, I’ve seen several people in the past also changing career paths at Taxfix. But maybe you want to start small by just working on a cross-functional project. A lot of projects here depend on a close collaboration between teams and departments, and by participating, you get to know more people and learn how they’re working and what they’re doing.

Last but not least, Taxfix is really good at getting talented people — very competent and, at the same time, down to earth. There are a lot of experienced people who enjoy sharing their knowledge and helping others to grow. The atmosphere is very supportive, and people are always willing to help and jump in if someone needs support. You’ll meet a lot of amazing people here.

Explore our career page and learn more about life at Taxfix.