This is a story about determination and a bit of luck — I share the conversation that secured my first tech job and my two biggest learnings from that process at end of this article.
These learnings are valuable to any field. Get motivated.
13 years ago I was working in an economist / analyst role at a local 100 year old company that was set in it’s ways. A close friend of mine was a software developer and he seemed to enjoy the work. The pay was above average also (read — more than I was making). I had been at my current company (first job out of college) long enough to start wondering what my next step would be.
You Need to Start Somewhere But Prepare to be Humbled
After building-up some interest, I started to teach myself C# and SQL. I was feeling good about my progress and thinking, “yeah, I can definitely learn this tech stuff”. Little did I know that I was going to be humbled very shortly.
If I’m being honest, all I was doing at this point was Hello World-ish level tutorials. This was fine for me to start off learning, but I would need so much more.
I found myself progressing and at one point trying to learn Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts.
I felt like I was drinking from a firehose — there was so much information going in.
I understood the individual concepts, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how it all fit together.
Not having taken any coding classes in college, I didn’t know how I was going to move from the Hello World-ish projects to implementing code on an actual service.
All I could do was tell myself that it’s ok if I don’t get the big picture just yet, and to keep learning and building my knowledge.
So I kept reading. Asking questions. Watching videos. Writing code.
I finally got to the point where I was feeling moderately confident in what I had learned so far and wanted to see what kind of jobs I could get with my current level of knowledge.
Look for Someone To Model Your Path After
My friend had been doing contract work for some of the local Big Tech companies and some smaller companies as well. I decided to reach out to a couple consulting firms and see what kind of interviews I could get.
After talking to recruiters, they told me about the different types of roles available at the bigger companies. They thought I’d be a good fit for a “Program Manager” role.
I learned that this role was a hybrid role that was a combination of business requirements gathering, translating those requirements into technical specifications, project management and depending on the team, some technical implementation work.
Time to be Humbled
I ended up going through multiple interviews and learned that some of these roles still required technical experience that I just did not have yet.
I felt deflated by a couple of these interviews, and especially low after one.
The good news was that I had a better sense of where I stood and that there were some roles which were more inline with the little bit of technical knowledge and other skill sets I had.
Luck is on My Side
I knew I wasn’t technically amazing at this point, but I did have drive.
The last round of one interview at a Big Tech company was with the hiring manager. We talked briefly about the skills required for the job and did a little bit of white boarding which went moderately ok.
We ended up spending the majority of the interview on how I ran new electrical wiring
for my 1,200 sq ft unfinished basement in my house. I explained how I went about learning what the local codes were for running wiring from the electrical box to unfinished bedroom, bathroom, and living area. How I figured out the proper way to connect the wiring for different types of lighting and switches. How to do the job better than a professional would.
It was an incredibly engaging conversation with the hiring manager. He even shared some of his own home remodeling adventures.
I honestly believe this conversation is what got me the job.
Was this my Dream Job?
This was my first time in a Technical Program Manager role. It was a smaller Business Intelligence team that owned data sourcing and reporting for several business units.
We published a “Metrics Scorecard” weekly and monthly. We would source data from multiple places into our SQL based Data Warehouse and Cubes using Extract Transform Load (ETL) pipelines. We were using SQL Service Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS), and Reporting Services (SSRS).
If any of these pipelines or cubes broke, I would have to debug and fix them. I used SQL to query the data to run some basic validations and answer adhoc business questions on occasion.
This was not how I envisioned my first role in tech to be.
I wasn’t writing any enterprise-level code in C#, but that didn’t matter. I was learning about a technical area that I didn’t know much about and it was interesting. I continued to create projects in C# with my free time – my goal was still to eventually transition to a software engineer role.
Each day I worked hard to make sure I understood the technical aspect of what I was doing. I wanted to know how everything worked under the hood. This greatly improved my technical skills used in this job. It helped build my confidence and expand my mental model of the types of tech work out there.
Hard Work Pays Off
I worked as a contractor on this team for less than 6 months before the team put me through an interview loop and hired me on as a Full Time Employee for my first role in Big Tech. I even was able to secure a promotion to the next level in my current role before preparing for my next jump.
The biggest takeaways from this experience were two-fold:
- You should start interviewing before you think you have the perfect skills for the job. Sure, you might get humbled, but you also might have somebody on your loop who sees the potential in you.
- You don’t always need to be going in the exact direction of your goal. The path to success is not always a straight line.
Thanks for reading and please let me know in the comments if you’d like to hear more from me!
Checkout the original post on Medium here.
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