The Cost of Growth
I wasn’t one of those kids who knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t have aspirations to be a fireman or a doctor, though I would have been happy being a basketball player or a famous rockstar. I always imagined myself living a comfortable life in a nice house, maybe with a little fenced-in yard where my future dog, Omelette, could run around. However, I had no foresight about the work it would take to attain that comfortable life, and I had no interest in thinking about it. I applied to two universities not too far from my hometown, and was the first person in my family to attend college.
I studied psychology during my time at Temple University, but I soon realized that an advanced Psychology degree was not for me. After college I went the practical route, and got a job working with focus groups, thinking I would be able to apply what I had learned in college. Instead, I found the work dry, dull, and uninspiring. I had two or three other jobs that also left me wanting, and finally took a sales job at a small start-up called PRN, that sold holistic health supplements for a variety of ailments.
I worked in sales at PRN for one year. I didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t fulfilling. I was almost ready to quit and try my luck elsewhere when I was promoted from sales to quality assurance. In this new position, I evaluated a salesperson’s pitch, and I created and implemented a performance rubric. It was the first time I had a taste of what it felt like to be a problem-solver in a workplace, and I really enjoyed the feeling.
After six months, I was promoted again to data analyst, and about two years after that, I became a financial analyst. With each promotion at PRN, my job was centered around problem solving more and more. However, I was not giving any additional training, or certifications. It got to the point where if I missed a day or two of work, I would return to a myriad of emails from the heads of every department, asking me to help them work out an issue. Sometimes I would work with IT, sales, marketing and accounting all in an eight-hour work day. My job was like a puzzle, and I was often responsible for finding the one piece that would fix everything. I knew that I loved being a problem-solver. What I didn’t love on the other hand, was not having a good sense of my role. I was jack of all trades, master of none.
In March of 2020 I started to look for other jobs. In many ways, it was the absolute worst time to consider a career change, but if I learned anything from the pandemic it’s that life is too short to live an uninspired one. After scanning only a couple of listings, one thing stuck out to me. Every job that I was remotely interested in required some sort of a coding element to it, whether it be SQL experience, Python, or both. If I had been in this same situation a few years ago, I likely would have just applied to the jobs I was qualified for, and continued to live an unfulfilling professional life. But I had been complacent about my career for too long. I decided that it was time to take a risk, and to not settle for a sure thing. I started to research software engineering and specifically, coding bootcamps.
I am a very careful and tactical person. I don’t jump into anything without first doing extensive research, almost to an agonizing fault. What immediately stuck out to me in my research of bootcamps, is how similar coding is to playing an instrument. I was a drummer as a child, and taught myself guitar in college. I probably would have taught myself sooner but I was intimidated to learn how to read music, just as I was (and still am) intimidated by learning how to code. Just like learning an instrument, coding takes a ton of practice, and even more if you really want to perfect your skill. I love expressing myself through music, and through coding, you are able to express an idea and turn it into a reality. Like writing code, you can play a chord on a guitar several different ways. There is room for creativity and adding your own flare, whether you are using a computer keyboard or a fretboard.
I continue to be frustrated, overwhelmed, and exhausted by coding bootcamp. I now know this to be a sign that I am headed in the right direction. Struggling is the cost of growing as a person and refining your trade. I continue to be awed by how much I have learned in such a short period of time, how satisfying it is to solve a problem, and how software engineering is my favorite new instrument.
