Six months ago, I got my first developer job as full stack web developer for a startup. I had no relevant work experience, no tech degree, and not even a year of active coding experience. And yet I managed to land my dream offer, and can today for the first time in my life say that I love my job. Here’s how I did it — the long version.
Part 1: Embracing the quarter-life crisis
About three years ago, I was in the middle of a raging quarter-life crisis. I’d graduated from business school, gotten an attractive investment banking job, and then quit that same job just a few months in after realizing I hated everything about it.
Completely lost and quite cliché, I went solo traveling for a few months to “find myself”. And although I thought I did, I didn’t. Not enough anyway. But it actually helped me figure out a few things.
The first thing was that I simply couldn’t keep pursuing a finance career. I just couldn’t see any future scenario where that would make me happy.
The second thing was that backpacking and surfing, although being great and all, wouldn’t help me find that “calling” I was looking for. The only reasonable thing to do seemed like the classic trial-and-error method.
So when I got back home, I decided to try out a few things that I thought might both make me happy and at the same time provide for some sort of decent living. And trial-and-error it was.
First, I thought I’d give writing a serious shot. So I started writing and editing part-time for an online business magazine. It was pretty cool for a while. Working three days a week in a fast-paced editorial office, writing about anything business, finance, tech or sustainability-related.
At the same time, I’d heard so much about life as a freelancer while travelling that I thought I’d try it out. So I set up my own firm, and soon enough stumbled upon a few business analyst projects. Being my own boss was of course very exciting at first, and being able to work from literally anywhere was completely new for me.
I went on like this for about eight months, doubling as a writer/editor and a freelancing business analyst. But eventually I started losing interest in the job at the magazine.
As any sane person dealing with digital content will know, clickbait cultures come at the expense of creativity and quality. In other words, when the main incentive of your content is clicks, all the superlatives required to hunt down those clicks will soon wear down on any creative ambitions that were there in the first place. Besides, I couldn’t shake the feeling that as a writer/editor, I was always too far away from the action I was reporting on.
So I quit. Which was ok according to my trial-and-error deal with myself. But it still felt crappy, since I’d actually invested eight months into the whole writing thing. But as someone smart may or may not have said: when one door closes, another one opens.
And I still had one more thing on my trial-and-error list to check off.
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