How did you become a software developer?
So I suppose that is also quite a long story...
Not gonna lie, when I left med school, life sucked quite a bit. I had what felt like a gaping chasm in my life. I had worked for years to get into medical school. I was also literally in thousands of dollars of credit card debt for MCAT courses, moving costs, supplies for school, etc (not to mention 200K of student debt between my wife and I). And then with a baby on the way... Living in my father-in-law's attic... I had to face that question of "what do I do with my life?" head on.
The wife and I moved back to our home state to be with family. To pay the bills I applied to basically every job that I could - in science (as much as I didn't want to) and out of science in completely unrelated fields. So that was a pretty tough/depressing time.
Eventually, through someone I knew back home, I got an interview with a political marketing firm (so WAY out of my comfort range). They could tell that I was a hard working and unique guy, not to mention even having "got into med school" in your history, people assume you can do a pretty good job at whatever. I ended up having 4 interviews with this place because of their indecision on trying to figure out whether my past work and my past work ethic could translate. Thankfully I got the job. I was doing marketing and project management and just hated it (again, it was just a tough time).
So on evenings and weekends I started to heavily invest time in other areas that might interest me. I was shadowing police officers at night, talking to nurses, talking to pastors, engineers, basically any job out there. Just starting from square one, as if I was in middle school. Just trying to get an idea of what jobs even existed?
Among my wandering, I stumbled upon some IT stuff from a family member who worked at Microsoft. We had some chats and it sounded good enough to me - at least better than what I had going for me. So I started studying for various IT exams to help break into the industry. It was kind of interesting (better than what I had going, but still not quite "it"). During that time, an old buddy of mine randomly hit me up to say he was starting a non-profit. We caught up and I told him what I was doing with my life (studying to break into IT). He heard that as "you can develop our website for us." So I winged my way through some terrible wordpress website haha.
The non-profit died, along with my website, but I was just absolutely hooked. That was maybe like a littler over a year after I left med school. So from then on I dropped IT and started fervently learning various programming stuff. I wandered a bit for a few months. I started with simple web (HTML/CSS/Javascript) stuff - videos and practice stuff online, but wasn't making much headway. Eventually I jumped to Swift and started learning IOS/mobile development - which was an incredible experience. I continued to mess around with learning programming for like a year on my own.
Around that time (I guess this was maybe like 2 years out from med school), somehow word got out that my company was looking for a Jr. Developer. The next day I walked into the president's office and point blank asked him to give me the job. I told him I would do anything and learn anything to make it work. Because of my work ethic and good work that I continued to do in my marketing position, they miraculously gave me a shot at it. That was like a year ago. I spent the first two months mostly just soaking up languages and technologies and whatnot. Took me about 4-6 months to become reasonably competent. Now I am getting pretty dang solid; albeit will be a few years until I could call myself an expert.
I continue to learn new cool stuff every day. I spend a lot of my time outside of work studying and learning new languages and technologies, and building stuff that I am interested in and/or that I think will boost the resume. Besides some typical office politics and crap, I feel like I have the coolest job in the world. The future looks very good.
