How I Knew It Was Time to Make My Career Change
I’m not sure if there’s ever a ‘right time’ for a career change into development. All I can say is to notice the signs when you see them.
I honestly expected to tackle this topic a little further down the road, but after thinking about the next most important thing for someone in my shoes to know, this felt like a good place to start.
The long and short of it is this: career change, whether it’s voluntary or not, seems like this towering mountain that you’re sure there’s no way you can scale. That’s alright if you feel that way, you’re not the only one.
Instead of making sweeping generalizations that may or may not be good advice, I want to work through my own situation and describe some of the flags that told me switching from marketing to software development might be best for me.
1.) My father was a software engineer growing up: Since I can remember, my father has been working in computer languages. He likes to tell people that before I was born in 1990, he made it to a second round of interviews at Microsoft. Our lives would have been just a little different if he’d landed that gig, but my larger point is that tech is something I’ve always been around. I remember my father and I buying parts so that I could build a PC when I was younger and I also remember the afternoon that I spent in his office in middle school where he tried to teach me how to do a “Hello World!” project in ColdFusion.
- why this was a good sign: This kind of set my life down a pretty tech-focused path early on. Building my own PCs as a kid and my interest in Android phones really helped to keep me Online™ and fluent in how technology works. From the basic “intro to coding” courses that I’ve taken so far, the languages I’ve interacted with all seem to work in a somewhat similar way. In the same way that Spanish, French, and other romantic languages work similarly, it seems that my upbringing in technology was a good basis for this career change I’ve started down.
2.) I wasn’t engaged with my current work: The alternate headline for this is “I was fired.” There’s a much longer and more nuanced reason why I’m leaving my content marketing career behind, but one of the more salient points is there were plenty of times where I was not engaged with what I was doing on a day-to-day basis. In content marketing that meant admitting to myself that even though I enjoyed writing and creating content that furthered a particular business objective, the content itself that I was writing about wasn’t getting me to jump out of bed every morning (not that your work has to do that for you to be successful, that’s a topic for another time). It’s really an existential question to ask yourself and certainly not one you want to be asked by your boss (‘Is this something you really want to be doing?’), but if these kinds of feelings are persistent, you should pursue all the options you have available to you.
- why this was a good sign: After being let go rather quickly from another job, I took a step back and evaluated if content marketing was the path that I wanted. In my specific situation, it seemed like it wasn’t healthy for my professional career and my mental health to keep bouncing around jobs here in Central Indianapolis. The lack of engagement with my work was a good reason to step back and do a retrospective to see if this was really what I wanted to keep doing. When I sat down for the intro to coding class at ElevenFifty, I felt a level of excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Working through those lines of code searching for ways to solve a problem was fucking awesome. That was a big indicator for me.
3.) There were coding school options that worked for me: Listen, as much as I want to say that I’m a work-from-home master and someone who can learn something just from a few online courses, I’m not. If I could find them, I’d gladly point you to the transcripts for the grades that I got when I tried to take a few courses online “at my own pace, without teacher direction” and all that nonsense. That may work for some people, but I am not one of them. To learn something to the level that I want to learn programming languages, I knew that I needed a teacher, someone to bounce ideas off of, ask questions, and tell me why something doesn’t work when I try to do something a certain way. If I’m taking the time out of my career and taking more loans, I wanted to do it right.
- why this was a good sign: Pretty self-explanatory. I covered a lot of these points in last week’s blog.
4.) I’ve come to realize that I’m more analytical than I originally believed: So this is an interesting one, but it definitely played into my decision-making process into all of this. The first step toward this realization is two of my closest friends commenting that I have a tendency to explain my train of thought whenever we’re hanging out together, to the point that I dominate a lot of the conversation just explaining my thoughts and how I reached a certain idea. The second step was working through the DISC profile at my last job and getting the following results:
S-style WHADDUP?! Everyone that looks at this has just assumed that I was a software developer without me even saying anything and it makes sense that I lean into something that accentuates my personality. Third step involved me questioning why I even got into writing in the first place. It’s a long story, but I’ll chop it down for you: I joined the high school newspaper originally as a photographer. I only started writing because the standard news story has a very defined structure and I found it easy to replicate that structure when the help was needed. That leads me to my degree and journalism, blah blah. The point is, I got deep into writing because of that structure. That was very telling when I stumbled upon it.
- why this was a good sign: From what I’ve been told, it helps to be a little bit analytical when learning programming languages. What I’ve seen and know of the basic HTML and CSS, everything has its place. If you open a bracket, you always need to close it. One comma in the wrong place can ruin the entire page, and you have to know where to look to fix it. Finding out about the analytical side of myself has definitely eased my fears of career switching over these past few weeks.
5.) The lease on my apartment was ending: Let’s be real, there’s a practical side of career change that just told me it was time to go. I lost my job two months before the lease on my apartment was ending and after my last job search, I was in no position to sign a new lease without having some stability. So I decided to move in with my parents while I go to this bootcamp and get my shit in order. Am I excited about being 29 and living at home? Not really. Is it in my best interest to get things going in the right direction? Absolutely.
- why this was a good sign: I don’t think that I’m a believer in predestination or signs from the big guy above, but this was one of those things that just seemed to all line up at the right time. Paying rent in this world isn’t cheap at the moment, and I recognize that I’m privileged to have the ability to move back in with my parents in lieu of other worse options, so this all made sense all at the right time. If you’re thinking of changing careers and something like this presents itself, you might have to swallow some pride and move into the basement for a while. It’ll be best for in the long-run (even as I type that I realize that I’m not quite accepted with that idea myself, but I know it’s true. Join me in the quest to try and accept that idea).
Those are the bigger signs that were floating around my head before taking this plunge into a new career. They’re not all the reasons, but they are some of the more consequential ones that convinced me to get moving. If you ask me today, I’m still a little anxious about it all, but my situation doesn’t allow for a lot of time for reflection. I hope these anecdotes resonate with anyone who is considering making a change in what they do.
Later this week I’ll be diving into my experiences in the intro coding courses I’ve taken so far! See you then!
