Programming Is Just a Job
Or how I tripled my salary in three years by making the switch to tech
It was 10:12am on a cloudy October day in Edinburgh, Scotland when I got an email from the recruiter of the company that I’d been interviewing at. “Hi Bianca, I hope you’re doing well and enjoyed the interviews yesterday. Please can you let me know if there is a good time for me to call you today with an update?” . I wasn’t expecting her to get back to me so quickly. I had only had the last round of interviews the day before. The promptness could only mean one of two things, which my mind kept juggling all morning — I either did so well that they had no doubt I was right for the role, or I did so bad that they decided right then and there that they were not going to hire me. The latter was always what my self-sabotaging brain would make me believe.
Thankfully, we arranged a call a couple of hours later, and it was good news — they offered me a job as a Software Developer Apprentice, which meant I had made it, I’d manage to career-switch my way into tech, something I’d been contemplating and working towards for the past year and a half. The figurative foot was in the door, and all I had to do now was work hard. Or at least that’s what I thought.
Growing up, one of the few things that I felt truly passionate about was learning English. I grew up bilingual and English was the main foreign language taught at my school, from the age of three. I picked it up really fast, and my love for it made me spend most of my teenage years reading books and watching movies and TV shows in English. This meant that, although not clear on what I wanted to do in the future, I knew where I wanted to do it: in an English-speaking country. And so my search for university courses in the US started. The American Dream was calling to me, but I was rudely awakened when I was made aware of the cost of attending university in the States, especially as a foreigner. So I took a look closer to home, both literally and figuratively: the United Kingdom, and, more specifically, London.
Uni in London was fun, and although I value the people I met and the lessons I learned, when my degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management was over, I felt lost. Halfway through my second year, I knew I had to find something more meaningful to dedicate my life to. Prompted by a classmate, I took an in-person introductory course to HTML/CSS/Javascript with Code First: Girls. I remember this was at the White Collar Factory building in Old Street. Needless to say it changed my perception of what I was capable of. Not long after that I became a recurring visitor to sites like Udemy and Codecademy, fascinated by what code can do.
I now had some direction, but no plan. I knew I wanted to change careers, but I didn’t even know if it was possible. I was on my way to getting a degree, so spending another three years pursuing a second one was not an option. I needed money to survive and this meant that I had to get a job. So that’s what I did. I worked for a couple of fintech startups (at that time) doing customer service, and it took me about a couple of years of research and self-teaching to arrive to the conclusion that a software engineering apprenticeship was the optimal route for me to get into tech.
At that point, what I was passionate about was changing the direction and taking control of my life, which takes me to the beginning of this article. The apprenticeship role I was hired for involved a 3-month bootcamp with Makers that I thoroughly enjoyed. I worked as an apprentice for the next 15 months, after which I was promoted to Software Development Engineer I, working in Reliability Engineering. My salary range as a customer service agent three years ago today was on the lower end of £20–30k p.a. I am getting ready to say goodbye to my current employer to start a new (incredibly exciting) role, where my salary range is three times what I was getting back then.
I will talk about this more in another blogpost, but my addition to the current Twitter discourse on why people code for a living and the reasons behind it is the following: passion for the craft is great, but I have learned so much more from people who do it because they are passionate about getting very good at something and then teaching others how to do it.
I am still asking myself whether tying my worth and meaning to my job is a mindset I want to reject or adopt. I believe that this is what it comes down to — whether being a programmer is what you are or whether it is what you do.
