How I switched from a degree in the humanities to a career in software development

In my three year career in software development, I’ve found many texts covering the experiences of people who, like myself, worked and studied different things before switching to tech. However, I noticed that these people, understandably, usually had a background in engineering, physics, or had always been huge tech enthusiasts in general (like many gamers, for instance).

I couldn’t really relate to these texts, so I fell short in trying to find some type of solace for the many insecurities that I had (and still have) being a person with a degree in the humanities who did a 180 degree change in my professional life. Now, three years and a half later, I could attempt to write a piece that perhaps can give said solace to someone else.

If your math is mathing, and you saw the date this post went live, you’ll notice that I entered the software development market in the middle of the pandemic, during the craze of a boiling market so in need of new blood that accepted anyone willing to step in. And I was one of those willing people.

Hear me out, I would love to sit here and tell you a beautiful story about what drove me in April 2020 to sit down and start a software development bootcamp, but I’m afraid you won’t find any beauty here. I was an unemployed recent graduate in International Relations and had plenty of time under my belt to listen to every single catastrophic scenario epidemiologists could give. I knew, from the get go, things would be bad. And while Economics was probably my worst subject matter on my four-year graduation, I still studied enough to know that me and my degree were on the weaker end of a stick about to break.

The only thing I wanted was a job. Any job. I never fell for the promises of “tech extremely high salaries”, because I wasn’t even aiming for that. I just wanted money in my bank account every month, even if it was not much. I wanted the possibility of thinking of the future. Beyond that, I just never had a huge amount of love for my degree, which definitely made the choice easier. It was interesting, and I learned a lot. My internships were incredible experiences, but the thought of abandoning all of it was actually quite easy and simple.

Initially, I was aiming at two targets at once. While I kept searching for jobs related to my degree, I studied software development. However, I soon quit the idea of trying to find jobs in my original field of study, at first because they barely existed in 2020, but also because… programming suddenly became much more interesting as a career. You are probably thinking it was because of the money. Well, not quite.

Let 's unpack that.

At the worst of times, a development career it’s still pretty great, and you only think otherwise because you’ve never worked with anything else

Alone, afraid of a virus, unemployed, no friends, no money, no prospects and in the middle of a pandemic that I knew would be followed by economic recession, it is safe to say that the year of 2020 was pretty tough on my mental health. I am lucky to have such a wonderful family and Taylor Swift. But besides my relatives and the release of folklore, programming actually helped my mental health so, so much.

Programming allowed me to build things that I honestly never thought I would be able to do. I was the kind of person who grew up thinking I was not creative or interesting or artistic. And suddenly, there were so many possibilities quite literally on my fingertips. It was simple, and it was like playing around, and it felt distracting and fun.

It was stressful, sure, but the stress was soon evened out by a sense of community built within the members of the bootcamp. Many of the people that studied with me had programmed before, and were so willing to help. None of them thought not even for a second that I could not learn and it was a wonderful environment to be in. While I definitely do not condemn competition, I am also such a cooperative person - as weird as it sounds, even though I never considered myself a tech enthusiast, working in tech actually put me in places that fit my personality and work style much better.

The career possibilities also were very inviting for me. Working from home seemed overall more acceptable than in many other areas. And even with more traditional companies, there are jobs outside the big large city that my life has always gravitated around - São Paulo. I hate the godforsaken city of São Paulo very much, for a multitude of reasons. With my degree, I simply could not conceive life outside the all-consuming-mammoth that is São Paulo. In tech, however, that is possible - harder, but possible.

In many ways, software development gave me… a horizon, something that I could dream of, even if it was hard to achieve.

Is it still worth it?

I don’t regret it and I would do all of it again. The job market nowadays is drastically different though, and much harsher on beginners. I don’t go as far as saying that switching from other fields is not worth it anymore, but it is a decision that requires a lot more thought and strategy. Researching about the areas that need developers the most is a must to get the transition done. Besides, I do think it’s important to point it out a couple of privileges and also just moments of sheer luck that I had:

• I am a single young woman with no kids who live with her home-owning parents. Meaning that rent and feeding babies was never really a worry. I don’t really know if I would recommend this path to someone with kids or much bigger responsibilities than me
• I started in a moment where the job market was really great and was able to find jobs with just six months of constant studying, even if the wages were not great. Money, as much as it matters, was not a top priority for me, and it took me a few years to get to a salary range that was actually good. I could afford to make the choice to earn less for a couple of years, but how many people can actually do that?
• I have a degree in the humanities, but the reason why I chose International Relations (despite the fact that it just sounded interesting) was simply because I was good with languages. Text comprehension and learning foreign languages were my best subjects at school and you see, learning programming languages, even if they contain a lot of logic in it, still is like learning a language. So ironically enough, I never truly was on the opposite end of the spectrum: knowledge is not compartmentalized like that. My communications skills helped me a lot on this journey.

The awful part

I intend on writing an entire different piece about how I became a programmer who was almost too scared to write code. For this text, it suffices to say that the choice fatigue, the lack of basic computer science knowledge, lack of a deep love for tech and online hype for sure took a toll on me.

I could write an entire motivational paragraph about my choices and how they made me feel over the years, but the only thing I want you to take from this text if you arrived this far is: no, it was not an easy path. But really, none of the others would be either.