Nuking my life and starting over part II
On becoming unrecognizable
If you haven’t heard how I wound up in North Carolina in 2016 as a baby dev, you can read more about that in Nuking my life and starting over part I. Where we left off, I had gotten through my bootcamp program by the skin of my teeth.
“Here’s some fonts”
As I prepared to finish my bootcamp program in 2016 I can’t overstate the mix of emotions I went through. I’d nearly flunked out of the first unit, forced to present an unholy mess of JavaScript in a presentation I began by saying “Here’s my project and, spoiler alert, it doesn’t work”.
Feeling clever, I opened my capstone bootcamp project I needed to graduate by saying “And spoiler alert — everything works”.
Although it felt momentous to me to have made it, to not have failed out like 1/3 of the rest of my cohort, there was apparently still some skepticism about my ability to succeed in the field. I remember one of the instructors pulling me aside during the session where we received parting advice and review of our final project.
I left with the very, very, VERY clear impression that this person thought I might be suited to design or able to do minimally involved HTML tasks. They gave me a list of resources about font choices and CSS as our parting words. Although we were told to style ourselves as full stack, if I’m being honest as a bootcamp grad I was a “nothing stack” developer. (My best skill though was probably Ruby, so who knows why this person thought I’d land in design other than a bias people seem to have that a) the closer you are to an end user, the less prestigious the work is and b) frontend and design are feminine-coded and less valuable activities).
It pains me now that I took all of these slights so in stride as if earned. I half agreed with them all. That maybe I still wasn’t good enough for this field but could sit as some lower tier of worker, on the periphery.
The first job
A string of embarrassments and rejections just reinforced this view. I was content to be lesser, I figured I would stay interested in the field forever if I had to stay striding. But when I got my first role at a nonprofit research institute and immediately went into learning backend/SQL, I felt a momentary triumph, like I had beaten my destiny for only “lesser” dev work.
This lasted about six months.
I had started with two other entry-level developers. One a music major and another a CS grad, they like me had relevant work history. The music major was beginning a Software Engineering masters program.
Six months into my new role I came across a Microsoft Teams chat about all of us new people starting from the head honcho of our work group. It read:
We need tasks for these new folks to do when they start! Jacob is interested primarily in database work. Steve can do either design or backend. JT, a woman, doesn’t know SQL well but has decent design capabilities and I’m thinking of having her take over for Jessica’s work.
Immediately I began spiraling into self-doubt. Why did they think I was a designer? I had no design background. Why did they introduce me by a weakness and everyone else by interests? I tried thinking back to my interview, whether I’d struggled on database questions and the only one I could recall not going so well was that I had to admit I’d never reindexed a table.
But they’d put me on SQL work anyway. Did that mean I did better than they thought? What was going on here?
I never found out. But that job managed to make me feel bad in enough other ways that I left. When I asked for an annual raise my boss shut me down completely and said it wasn’t earned, then quietly gave me a 3% bump to my under-market pay. When I accepted a role paying 20k more he immediately assured me that they could give me that raise after all.
But it was ok, I was prepared to scrap my way up through the ranks again.
Mid-level
I would say about a year and a half in, ugly duckling that I was in the programming world my inexperience fell away. I had hustled religiously up until that point. I spent every weekend coding. Some nights after work. I began going back to school for Software Engineering in my free time. I did millions of side projects, and when my mental energy was too drained I’d force myself to still at least do Codeacademy and improve my muscle memory. I redesigned my portfolio what feels like dozens of times. Every time I got to use a new skill I’d diligently add it to my resume, as I still half expected to be laid off at any moment, found out to be a fraud.
A year and a half in though, all the sudden I felt like “I know what I’m doing and y’all can’t tell me shit”.
Just kidding. I obviously had plenty to learn. But I no longer felt like the opposition I faced or vague insults or assumptions people made about me had merit. I saw myself, in that first job, do just as well as the CS degree guy. I saw myself, the one they called out at “inexperienced at SQL” be perfectly fine at it. When interviewing for my second job, I even corrected an experienced developer interviewing me on a nuance of how the DISTINCT clause in SQL works. (“Doesn’t know SQL” my ass).
That job got me back to earning at my pre-dev rate, > 70k. It was a fine amount to live on at that time in humble North Carolina. I was even able to resume traveling abroad, and rang in New Years in Iceland in 2018.
In a way by making it to mid level, full stack, I already did what I’d set out to do. I had proved that I wasn’t just another “stupid recruiter” and could do this work. I’d proved I was smart enough to make a living where people paid me for the ideas in my head instead of wanting me to shut up and do whatever they told me to.
Back in 2013 still nannying with no career prospects, I had written: I want to become unrecognizable. And I had.
Easy street
Ok, I didn’t go QUITE from mid-level to easy street. I had to fight like a feral animal to stop getting typecast into frontend work, which I’ve talked about before. (Eventually I did make it into being backend only and then currently I’ve begun to slide over into data engineering, an even backendier backend niche).
I’ve had men on my team literally (as best I can tell) pretend to be bad at JavaScript work so I’d have to do the yucky, non-prestigious work for them. Any time I’ve criticized a technology people have come out of the woodwork to tell me I must just be too junior to understand it.
But overall, those things didn’t stop me from living a pretty blessed life as a developer. After 2.5 years I was in a financial position to buy a 2600 ft home in Durham city limits. This was right before COVID struck and set me up to be near endless hiking trails to keep me busy during shutdown.
I got so much better at being a developer that I got promoted off cycle, asked to lead projects, made Lead in three years flat. School got so easy for me I could basically phone it in. I finished my degree in Software Engineering & Security able to mostly have just shown up and coded through my major courses without much reading the curriculum. (Hey, I was busy with other things lol). I became a mentor, got paid to freelance write, appeared on a few podcasts. Whose life is this, I wonder to myself sometimes. “Become unrecognizable”? Mission accomplished.
From my humble idea of just even existing in this field as some kind of peasant underclass developer doing “easy” stuff, this was success beyond my wildest dreams.
Becoming even unrecognizable-er
So all this, the success and how this career has been good to me overall, is why it is weird for me to say I think I have entered the twilight of my tech career. I’m going to talk more about this next time, when I guess I’ll publish a final chapter of this saga, “Nuking my life and starting over part III”.
But long story short, I’m about ready to upend my life once again, and have already started on a couple fronts. The only thing I’m sure of is that the ride should be interesting.
Catch you next time & thanks for reading!