Learning to be a Software Engineer
Reflections on my 1-year career-switch anniversary.
Originally published on my LinkedIn on August 30th, 2022
Part I: Who I am and why I bothered to leave a decade-long, flourishing tech career to become a Software Engineer
(The first ~10 years)
I spent the first 5 years of my career at various startups in both customer-facing and internal operations roles. Then in January 2016, I moved to Austin with my now-wife to take a job at Facebook (now "Meta"). I was a Program Manager in the Small Business Group accountable for hundreds of millions in annual revenue and thousands of customer interactions per week. In 2018, I also got trained as a professional life coach and ran a coaching side-business on nights and weekends.
I enjoyed it all because I love designing systems and structures that amplify human greatness.
But something was never quite right. My happy place is being in the creative studio meticulously crafting something. Yet...
The more I grew in my career, the more my time was spent looking at summary docs, spreadsheets, and slideshows. Artifacts prepared by other people with the intent of reviewing work of yet other people. So much of my day was spent being an information highway that I lost touch with my own creative expression.
The turning point
Enter the pandemic. Looking for something to captivate my brain away from all the tragedies, I started doing coding tutorials. I quickly remembered how much fun I had as a pre-teen writing HTML from scratch in notepad. Remembered how I even paid for a domain with a money order that I would purchase and physically mail every month. Remembered the satisfaction of my childhood Windows ‘95 computer making alien noises to connect to something called AOL. Remembered how I learned how to tie a tie because I Googled it.
The decision
Eventually, I noticed that I was looking forward to my tutorials at night more than most things I was doing at work during the day. As a coach you’re trained to pay attention to the feelings and signals in your life because they might be trying to express something important. After months of this, I turned 31 and thought, “if not now, when? What are you really waiting for?” So I left Meta without a backup plan, but I had a few months of savings, an incredibly loving partner, and a strong family support system. Above all, I was grateful for what I did have given how the world was doing overall.
Part II: Becoming an actual Software Engineer
A year ago today, I started as a Software Engineer at Abilitie. My friend, former colleague, and now boss, Luke Owings, connected me to the company. The team got to know me personally and agreed to bring me on despite how green I was in the field. They bet on the fact that I bet on myself to learn, and trusted me to contribute in other ways while I sharpened my engineering skills. Piece by piece across the front-end and back-end, we’ve spent 7 months building something that will radically improve our company’s ability to serve clients. So here I am… finally in the studio meticulously crafting something 🤓.
Over the past year, I’ve gone from the constant feeling that I blew up my life beyond repair, to meaningfully contributing to an app our team built from scratch. As hard as it’s been to learn to code 10 years into my career, it would’ve been so much harder to go another 10 years without being honest with myself.
What have I learned? Or what advice would I give my past self? Two things: space and grace.
Believe people when they tell you there’s no escaping the work. You MUST get the repetitions in. Like most impactful things in life, coding isn’t one of those things you read about in a blog and get a good gist for. It’s day-in, day-out practice. Too many days without coding and you slow down the very muscle memory you desperately need to accelerate.
Think big, start small. It’s okay to have grand ideas. But start with what you can build or fix today. Do whatever you need to do to gain and maintain momentum because momentum needs to be on your side for this transformation to ever work.
Give yourself some grace and completely accept that it really IS like learning to read. We all take for granted that we’re reading right now, but think back to when you didn’t yet know how to read. How did you learn? How many repetitions did it take till it stuck? How many mispronunciations? Now imagine syntax, algorithms, and data structures in a brain that’s not as empty a sponge as it was back then.
It’s okay to admit you’re learning and growing. I was so afraid to tell people I switched to Software Engineering because I probably didn’t even believe it about myself at the time. 1 year in, and I can finally say: there’s so much I don’t yet know and may never know, but I finally have enough repetitions to trust the human process of evolving through deliberate action and overcoming challenges.
Remember the best rollercoasters have the biggest drops and the twistiest turns. Some lows get really low, but nothing beats when you’ve squashed a bug that was beating you down for ages. Or even better - when you’ve created something that real people are really using to really serve clients or themselves better than they could yesterday.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. LMK if anything resonated, and wishing you the very best on whatever journey you're on.
With sonder,
Ruben Dario Martinez 🤟🏽