Background

I studied finance in college and got a job in investment banking after school. I didn’t particularly like the work or the people. After that, I joined a healthcare company in a finance role. The work was interesting initially but not so much after a year or so.

Sabbatical

I wasn’t really sure what to do next and I had savings (~2 yrs runway) so I quit with nothing lined up.

I felt like my mind had atrophied over the past several years so I really wanted to learn new things.

I spent the next two months reading a lot of different books (psychology, history, sci-fi, etc).

At some point, I got tired of reading and wanted to do something. One of the books I read was about learning new skills. I initially tried something related to art but didn’t really like it. Next, I tried learning to code.

Learning to code

The thing that interested me initially was a book called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. I figured learning how to automate things might be useful regardless of what I did.

I had fun working through the exercises and started working on a personal project that involved scraping some data.

One of the a-ha moments for me was when a friend of mine who was an engineer looked over my code and offered suggestions on how to make it better. My code was one long script. There was something really appealing about seeing my long messy code become a few simple lines that almost read like English.

After that, I wanted to do something more challenging. My friend was a boot camp grad and so he told me about the type of projects they work on.

For the next several months I worked on a few web application projects and I learned about websites, servers, and databases.

Career Change

I tried to talk to people who were software engineers and tried to figure out what it took to break into the industry.

Aside from actually being able to do things, it seemed like learning algorithms and data structures would also be important.

I spent a couple of months working through a course (Stanford algorithms), a book (cracking the coding interview), and other online resources (interviewcake, leetcode).

Then I started looking for a job.

Job Hunt

This was the hardest part of the transition. I had a really tough time getting interviews. I almost never heard back from applying online. I even reached out to recruiters and they didn’t really respond back. I think it’s understandable given I had no background or degree.

This article on getting a job in tech was super helpful. I started networking aggressively. I tried to reach out to software engineers in my network or anyone who worked at a company that hired software engineers. I also continued to work on projects and prepared for whiteboarding interview questions.

I did this for about 2-3 months and eventually, I landed a job. Since the time I quit, it was about a year in total.