Hey DEV community! 👋🏽
If you work in an engineering or engineering-adjacent role: how did you end up in your role? What has the hardest thing been for you? What do you like about your role?
I’ve been in tech for almost eight years (after switching careers) and I’m now on an engineering team! Previous to this, I was a content strategist on a developer relations team. I graduated with my Master’s in User Experience Design over the summer.
I’ve been in my current role for five months, and I’m a Senior Technical Program Manager on a web eng team. I ended up on my team serendipitously, the result of a re-org. My new manager selected me to lead a specific program, and I learned most of the role on the job (including Agile).
I’m now five months in and so grateful for the switch! I’m learning so much about myself and how to leverage my strengths in a completely new role. It’s not easy going from doing something you had years of experience in and was confident in to being a newb, but I’m energized by the work. I’m taking a related course, I’ve read quite a number of books, and spent some time looking at online tutorials for aspects related to my new job. And I’m excited to share that opportunities to do work that aligns with my UX degree is on the roadmap.
I look forward to hearing about your experiences!
Top comments (19)
It all started when I was 15 that I started being a "Sysadmin" for a rather small organization of people (We were only two 😅), we kept going for at least a whole year were I was in charge of Development support for the people who wanted to host their stuff but didn't know much about coding, keeping our infrastructure up and running and automatizing pretty much everything so I could stop doing repetitive work day after day.
I had to drop it for college, fast forward two years, had to drop college because of the entire Venezuelan situation.
Started doing freelancing, managed to save little money here and there while I was basically the pillar of my entire house.
Stuff went down in Venezuela and I had to leave (like pretty much every young citizen who wanted to remain mentally stable and without an empty tummy)
Started as a Full Stack Developer (Mostly NodeJS and Golang) in a big Portuguese company for a couple years, got kicked due to a shady budget cutout, moved to another big brand here in Spain and here I am, leading some of the cloud architecture for projects based on Document Management while still, automating stuff that consumes time with Go :).
I'm 26, born on April 21st and that's pretty much it.
I took an entrepreneurial path which means no specialization, lots of generalization, lots of hectic self-learning.
So I've slightly different roles, and evolving capacities to get stuff done, but I've basically had the title of "technical founder" the whole time.
I'm a product of being in the right place at the right time! I'm a bootcamp grad, and the bootcamp I attended sets up opportunities for graduates to present their final projects to companies. One of those presentations turned into a "Let's see how you work with the team." From there, I did those trial-run days. Those around me wanted me to keep looking.
I ignored them and now I love my job.
I dropped out of college after one semester; I was living in Ecuador at the time. I then moved back to the US and got a job as a repair tech at an Apple Store. I soon got tired of being treated like crap by the customers so I quit and landed a help desk role. I started to teach myself how to code and got an AWS certification, after a year and a half I landed my current job as a Cloud engineer, I've been in this role for almost two years now.
At the end of my college program we had a Capstone project that was meant to showcase everything we learned during our time there. Companies from the area came to see what we worked on and I was offered a job that same day as a Jr Software Developer. After 3 years there I wasn't feeling like it was good for my future so I moved on to become a Problem Analyst. I was only there for 6 months before realizing it wasn't a good fit for me. Luckily for me a previous company I had interviewed with was sending me offers to join there team so I did, landing me in my current position of Cloud Developer.
This is an interesting story. I was blogging for almost a year and made one open-source contribution.
Here is how I did it?
youtube.com/watch?v=1EvaxRIBU-8
Fast forward, I was casually looking for a job which was more challenging; I found this cool research team working on the life sciences domain.
I walked into their lab one day and showed my pandas contribution code and they showed me some of their work, that was the interview
2 days later I had my offer at hand.
I currently write code examples in Go for AWS docs. I got here by:
Not the last role, but my first US job: I was visiting a friend that put his office for sub-lease on craigslist. I was just checking my email when the new tenant came in and asked if I came with the furniture. They asked if I knew Ruby and I said I was a master, so they told me I could choose my desk. And that's how I met Miley Cyrus and subsequentially landed a dream job at PlayStation. <3
Close to 20 years in the software industry and have worked on various technologies for desktop, web, mobile (Android and hybrid), and backend apps. I made a conscious decision to move away from Android to Backend 2 years back and now enjoying the micro-services paradigm and its challenges.
I am in my late fourties, have been working in IT for over 20 years and don't dance ... at least not ballroom. My first degree was in Arts and I discovered an interest in computing as I was finishing that. Then I enrolled in some vocational training and after another 2 years got my certificate and my first fulltime IT job as a publications programmer working with Omnimark, SGML and XML. After 3 years I decided to study computer science part time as I found the vocational training background limiting. When that was finished I got another job as a .Net developer doing a mix of back end and Web development, where I stayed 10 years, mostly because it was convenient, I liked most my colleagues and didn't have much to do with the toxic company culture. After 10 years I quit and it took me 3 weeks to find a new job as a .Net web developer in a great team, which I left after about 3 years to move overseas. Now I have been working in a new role as .Net developer, have been doing a bit of win forms as well as web development. It's been challenging to start new roles after a 10 year stint, but it's also been rewarding. I would like to go back to my previous job though since there were some really strong developers on that team that I felt that I could learn a lot from.