How I Changed Careers and Landed a Job as a Developer in Six Months

All while in my late thirties, raising three small kids, and without a computer science degree.

A year ago, I never would have believed you if you told me I‘d be working as a full-stack web developer today. At the time, I was working a stable but unfulfilling marketing job, feeling more drained and stuck with each passing year. The idea of programming seemed impossibly complicated to me, like trying to decipher the Matrix. I had never even dipped a toe into coding.

Fast forward just six months and I‘m now working my dream job as a software engineer, getting paid to solve complex problems and build amazing things every day. It‘s been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my professional life. I‘m writing this post to share how I made it happen and the lessons I learned along the way.

Deciding to Take the Leap

The thought of learning to code and changing careers was something I had contemplated for years. But it always seemed like an impossible mountain to climb, especially while juggling a full-time job and helping to raise three kids under five. I had a good salary and great benefits – wouldn‘t it be crazy to give that up and start over again from square one?

A series of events last year finally pushed me over the edge to go for it. First, my wife decided to switch to part-time work so she could spend more time with our young kids. Around the same time, my employer announced major layoffs and restructuring. While I kept my job, it was a big wake up call that the "safe" path may not be so secure after all.

With a lot of discussion and budgeting, my wife and I came up with a plan for me to quit my job and focus on learning to code full-time for 6 months. If I wasn‘t able to land a developer job in that time, I‘d go back to marketing. It felt like the right time to bet on myself and see what I was capable of.

My Self-Study Process

The first step was figuring out what to learn and how to go about it. I knew I wanted to focus on web development as it seemed to present the most job opportunities and have a relatively low barrier to entry compared to other paths like data science or mobile development.

I started by working through freeCodeCamp‘s Responsive Web Design and JavaScript curricula. The interactive exercises and projects were a great introduction to the fundamentals of front-end web development. I supplemented this with Codecademy courses on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React.

According to a 2020 survey, freeCodeCamp and Codecademy are the two most popular online platforms for learning to code, used by 66% and 62% of respondents respectively. The majority of users across both platforms reported significant improvements to their job status and salary as a result of learning with these resources.

To reinforce my learning, I also worked on small projects and coding challenges outside of these platforms. Some of the projects I built in my first few months of learning included:

• A pomodoro timer app using HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript
• A weather app that pulled data from the OpenWeatherMap API and displayed a 5-day forecast
• A movie search app using React and The Movie Database API
• A basic CRUD todo list app with Node, Express, and MongoDB

These personal projects were a great opportunity to struggle through figuring things out on my own and Googling my way out of bugs and errors. I learned how to break down problems into smaller chunks, pseudocode solutions, and translate concepts into actual code. Building my own projects from scratch gave me a taste of the development process and a huge confidence boost.

I made sure to code every single day, even if I could only squeeze in 30 minutes between putting the kids to bed and collapsing into sleep myself. I watched countless YouTube tutorials, read hundreds of Medium posts and DEV articles, and worked through several highly-rated Udemy courses.

Some of the resources I found most helpful in this self-study phase were:

• Colt Steele‘s The Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy
• Andrew Mead‘s The Complete Node.js Developer Course on Udemy
• Wes Bos‘ JavaScript 30, ES6 for Everyone, and React for Beginners courses
• The Full Stack Open curriculum from the University of Helsinki
• Endless Stack Overflow posts for debugging specific issues

I also started attending local meetups and free workshops to connect with other aspiring developers and pick up new skills. I remember the first few I went to, I felt totally lost and out of place. But the community was so welcoming and I learned so much from talking to people with different backgrounds and experiences learning to code.

After about three months of intense self-study and project work, I started to feel more confident in my abilities. I could build small full-stack apps from scratch and was starting to develop a decent understanding of the core web development technologies. But I knew I still had a lot to learn and wanted to take my skills to the next level.

Investing in an Immersive Coding Bootcamp

As my self-imposed 6 month deadline approached, I decided the best way to accelerate my learning and become job-ready was to enroll in an immersive coding bootcamp. After thorough research, I chose one that focused on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) and had a proven track record of placing graduates in software engineering roles.

It was by far the most challenging educational experience of my life. For 12 weeks, I was coding 10-12 hours per day, 6 days a week. The curriculum was fast-paced, covering a new concept or technology every few days. We built 3 major full-stack projects, both solo and in teams. We learned Git workflows, agile development practices, and modern DevOps tools. We did daily algorithm challenges and mock technical interviews.

But the intensity is what made it so transformative. Being surrounded by other highly-motivated career-changers, getting hands-on instruction from industry veterans, and essentially living and breathing code for 3 months straight was exactly what I needed. I left with a solid understanding of how to build, test, and deploy complex full-stack applications and collaborate with other developers.

An immersive coding bootcamp was a major investment of both time and money. According to data from Course Report, the average full-time coding bootcamp in the US costs $13,584 and requires 14 weeks of full-time study. But for the majority of graduates, that investment seems to pay off.

The data shows that 79% of coding bootcamp graduates surveyed landed a job within 180 days of graduating. The median salary for first roles was $65,000, with some schools reporting figures as high as $95,000. Additionally, bootcamp grads seem to be in high demand, with hiring managers at companies like Spotify, Eventbrite, and Paypal saying they would "absolutely" hire another bootcamp grad.

Everyone has a different learning style and career goals, so an immersive bootcamp certainly isn‘t the only path to becoming a developer. But for me, it was the perfect way to gain in-demand skills quickly and open doors to roles that might have otherwise been unattainable with my non-traditional background.

Breaking Into the Industry

My bootcamp placed a big emphasis on career readiness, with resume workshops, portfolio reviews, and mock technical interviews starting in week 1. This preparation proved invaluable as I started applying for my first developer roles a few weeks before graduation.

I blasted out applications to every entry-level and junior web developer job I could find, aiming for a mix of large tech companies and smaller startups. I made sure to tailor my resume and cover letter to each role and highlight my transferable skills from my previous career in marketing.

Over the course of about a month, I applied to 137 positions. I heard back from 21 companies for initial phone screens, which led to 9 technical interviews, most involving a live coding challenge or take-home assessment. In the end, I received 2 offers.

Some of the technical questions I encountered during the interview process included:

• Implement a function to check if a string is a palindrome
• Write a function to find the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence
• Given an array of integers, find the contiguous subarray with the largest sum
• Explain the difference between SQL and NoSQL databases
• Describe the event loop in Node.js
• What is a higher-order component in React and when would you use one?
• Walk through how you would design the database schema for a social media app
• Whiteboard the architecture for a web application that can handle 1 million concurrent users

In the end, I accepted an offer for a junior full-stack engineer role at an early-stage startup. The salary was about 30% lower than what I was making in my previous marketing career. But the company had an exciting product, smart and supportive coworkers, and lots of opportunity for mentorship and growth. I was thrilled to officially start my new career.

Lessons Learned on the Job

Starting that first developer job was a major shift from the controlled environment of tutorials and bootcamp projects. I was suddenly working on a large and complex codebase, using technologies and tools I had never touched before. I felt like I had just learned to ride a bike and was now being asked to compete in the Tour de France.

It took several months to start to feel comfortable and competent. I learned to embrace the daily experience of feeling confused and lost. Every bug and error was an opportunity to learn something new. I got good at scouring documentation and asking my senior coworkers for help when I was truly stuck.

I also learned the importance of writing clean, readable, and maintainable code. In my personal projects, quick and dirty solutions were often good enough. But now I was writing code that other developers would have to understand and work with long after I touched it. I learned to optimize for readability and break complex tasks into small, modular, and reusable functions and components.

Six months into that first role, I was independently shipping new features and bug fixes to production. I had learned how to efficiently debug, write unit tests, and integrate with third-party APIs. I was starting to mentor more junior members of the team and even take on small leadership roles.

But I realized that even with the incredible amount of learning and growth in those first six months on the job, I still had a long way to go. Modern web development is a vast and constantly evolving field. There will always be new languages, frameworks, and paradigms to learn. That‘s part of what makes this career so exciting and challenging.

I‘ve now been working as a professional developer for over a year. I wake up every day excited to tackle hard problems and learn something new. It‘s been the most rewarding and intellectually stimulating experience of my career. And I‘m just getting started.

You Can Do This Too

If you‘re reading this post, considering a similar journey into web development, I want you to know that you absolutely can do this. It will not be easy. You will have moments of crushing self-doubt and impostor syndrome. You will feel completely lost and overwhelmed at times.

But if you are willing to put in the hard work and push past those tough moments, you will succeed. The demand for web developers is strong and only getting stronger. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that employment of web developers will grow by as much as 13% from 2020 to 2030, much faster than the average for all occupations.

And you absolutely do not need a computer science degree or previous tech experience to get your foot in the door. According to Stack Overflow‘s 2020 Developer Survey, nearly 40% of professional developers do not have a bachelor‘s degree in computer science or a related field. And 16% are purely self-taught, without any formal education in computer science.

Take advantage of the wealth of free and low-cost learning resources available online. Build your own projects early and often. Immerse yourself in the community and never stop learning. The path won‘t be linear and it won‘t happen overnight. But if a former marketer like me can make the switch, so can you.

Making a career change is a deeply personal decision with real risks and challenges. But if you are yearning for more creativity, growth, and impact in your work, I cannot recommend this path highly enough. It will stretch your mind in ways you never thought possible and empower you to build the kinds of amazing innovations that are shaping our world.

You owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot. Start small, be patient, and never stop learning. Before you know it, you just might find yourself living a whole new life, doing something you never dreamed you were capable of. Take it from someone who is truly grateful he took that first scary step – you‘ve got this.