My journey

I worked in retail for over five years, and I was tired. The required weekends, the limited opportunity to move up in what felt like a dying industry, and constantly making sure the customer was always happy was really becoming a grind. Looking at my career path, I knew something needed to change.

(Un)fortunately I was fired after recently taking on a new role at corporate. I was bummed as I knew promotions were hard to come by in the dying retail space. Living in the Bay Area, I had access to many people in tech, and once I had time to think about new ventures I started having conversations with them about their jobs.

• Do you enjoy it?
• Do you need a CS degree?
• Are coding bootcamps beneficial?
• How long does it take to be job ready?
• What does coding actually mean?

While taking a long drive I listened to a career podcast interviewing the founder of Treehouse, Ryan Carson. He kept talking about how anyone, and everyone, can learn how to do code. Calling it the ‘modern trades job’. I signed up for the $20 month online instruction after a few weeks of thinking. I was close to signing up to a coding bootcamp, luckily I didn’t. My thoughts on that maybe in a different blog.

You go at your own pace, but I was eager to start looking for new work. I hurried through the lectures, faking myself that I knew all the fundamentals. Spending 40 hours a week learning and taking information in.

After a week my confidence broke,

I went through the instruction too fast and all the previous information I should have known solid made the new info make zero sense. For those curious it was instruction on how to loop through a text field with a submit, render it on the page, and have only the first letter in uppercase. I was lost and I took a break for a week feeling defeated.

Luckily I decided to resume and go back and relearn many of the topics I breezed through. Things started to make sense. I knew I needed to make a website to advertise my work and after about 6 weeks I felt it was time to start.

Showing my work

I told my dad I wanted to redo his bands website. The standards were low. Even with my super beginner standards I knew I could do something better, so I started.

It took about 4 days to figure out how to make the layout mobile and desktop friendly. I asked many questions on Stack Overflow and was told I need to learn the fundamentals again (this meme is very relatable in my early days of coding).

After about a week of coding, and another week or learning how to publish it to the web, it was launched. Great, I had some work to use an example when looking for work. I built a small portfolio website, added the band’s site, and started applying.

Applying and my first gig

Very soon after I started applying for work I was getting responses. It felt great. Years of experience in retail I never got this much response so quickly.

The bad news is 90% of the work I just wasn’t qualified for. The other 10% was unpaid or required me to move and hoped it worked out.

Then I finally got my break.

It was an internship for a super small marketing agency in the Bay Area. The owner said she liked my work because not only was a green enough where she could educate and not just leave, but also I was the only one out of 100 applicants that provided a cover letter. Goes to show that cover letters can still work sometimes.

It wasn’t full time, but it was something where I can learn and add to my portfolio. It was mostly WordPress. She had a great clientele and lots of word of mouth business.

It took me five months from when I started learning web development to land this job.

Taking the jump and moving

While continuing to look for a full-time role, I kept talking with hiring managers and recruiters. It became clear that with the high salary expectations in the Bay Area, it would be very difficult to land a junior job in Silicon Valley. Most required at least two years of experience just to start a conversation.

I decided I needed to move to somewhere less competitive with a growing tech scene, I chose Austin.

Before moving, I still remember a conversation with a recruiter in Austin:

“So do you live north or south of town?”
“…Oh, you don’t live here yet.”

Her tone immediately changed and the conversation ended. It told me I would have a hard time landing a job if I didn’t already live there. You can promise someone that you’ll relocate in two weeks after getting an offer, but I’m sure they’ve been burned by that many times before.

So, I moved.

New jobs in new town

Soon after moving to town, I started getting a lot more traction than I had in California. I came close to landing an email developer role with an energy company, though I’m still not sure how I blew that one. I also interviewed with a political organization and spent an entire weekend completing their coding assessment. Looking back, I probably should have just asked them to make a decision instead of letting both of us waste the time.

After 5 weeks of landing in town I got my first full time role.

I received the job offer the same day as the interview. Based on the terrible ratings on Glassdoor, I knew it wasn’t a place I wanted to stay long term. I needed that experience so I took it.

It was stressful and draining, but as my mom suggested, I treated it like a first job out of college: get the experience and then move on.

That’s exactly what I did. A year later, I left.

Since then, I’ve been at the longest job I’ve ever had—a web marketer at SailPoint. It’s a great team, a growing company, and the work-life balance is excellent.

Looking back, it took about a year and a half of learning and working before I finally landed the tech job I had been aiming for.

Conclusion

I hope this write-up gives some perspective on the work required to land that first job in a new field.

Is it a linear path? No.
Was it a lot of work for little pay at first? Definitely.

But considering how much it has improved my quality of life, I highly recommend this path to anyone interested.

I often tell parents whose kids are unsure what they want to do after high school or college to consider learning how to code. I’m happy to see more schools teaching it, because I believe it should be accessible to everyone.