It was not a happy day when I passed the official milestone of 1,000 hours of trying to become a developer. I was still without a job, and long, painful experience had taught me that interviews in the offing counted for little.
So I saved this photograph in a draft of this post, wiped my board clean, and stenciled out the twenty-first matrix. I intended to write a blog post about how far I've come in my coding journey and all the things that I can work with now, of which I had scant knowledge a year-and-a-half ago — Ruby, Rails, coding puzzles, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Instead, I turned off my computer and went to the gym.
A career change is always hard, and these days no-one cares much for the travails of a married man who dreams of providing for his family. Looking for work is laborious, thankless, frustrating, exhausting, and depressing. But what's the alternative? I had to keep on going.
So the next day I turned on my System76 computer, for which I am most grateful, and spent the next few days studying hard on Udemy. I put thoughts of whether I might get a job out of my mind and concentrated on studying and writing code — which, despite all the frustrations, I enjoy for its own sake — and to cut a long story short, fortune smiled on me two weeks later.
Those of you who follow me on LinkedIn will have noticed a small, but rather important update in my profile:
It's been two weeks in the job and I've almost completed a full cycle of pomodoros of productive work. After going to roughly twenty interviews, someone finally agreed to give me a chance, and I think my colleagues will agree that I've grabbed it with both hands.
So, it didn't take me exactly 1,000 hours, but rather 1,015½ hours, but what do I have to show for it? A mission accomplished and a career change effected.
Of course, in an important way, my work has only just begun: time is limited and there's lots to learn.
But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's making the most of my time.
Tick, tock, and all that.
Something tells me that you're probably closer to being an engineer than most people with an MS in CS. Now you've finally got your foot in the door, and off to a great start at a new career.
ReplyDeleteNever forget to take time for your personal experiments and explorations, and have fun!