Why Software Engineering?
Two weeks ago, I started the online Software Engineering intensive at Flatiron School. Right now, I’m scared, I’m overwhelmed, I’m desperately keeping afloat in a sea of terror at the state of pretty much everything happening in the United States — but also, I’m excited. It turns out, I like coding a lot? Like, a lot. And I’m so, so grateful to have that, and the chance to grow and develop it as a skill as I move forward in this career.
At the beginning of March 2020, I had a job I loved, a five year plan for advancement, and a wary positivity about my personal future. At the end of March 2020, I had an unprocessed claim for unemployment, a non-existent industry, and a close relationship with the yawning void where my certainty used to be.
What felt like overnight, my career was no longer an option. For the (un)foreseeable future, there is no ethical way of holding large-scale events in New York City, or most of the US. It was announced today that Broadway is closed through, at earliest, 05/31/2021 — even if I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. The entire industry is on hold, and hundreds of thousands of us are left floundering.
From the beginning, I knew I couldn’t be one of the people who waited it out. I’m too antsy for that — if I don’t keep my mind engaged, I feel like I’m buzzing out of my skin. Also, more depressingly but more importantly, money. I did the math, and while I was lucky enough to have savings, they gave me maybe two months of security once extended unemployment benefits ran out.
So I had a deadline — I needed to be moving on an alternate life plan by July 31st.
I tossed around a lot of ideas, but the only one that stuck was getting serious about learning to code. I’d thought about studying software engineering for years, but always dismissed it as something I was too late for — something I had missed my chance on when I was 18 and choosing a major. There was also the part of me that constantly whispered, “You’re not smart enough for this. Even if you learn what to do, no one should trust you with making anything — you’ll mess it up, you always mess it up.” Which, even at my low points, I KNOW is untrue — it’s some unfounded Imposter Syndrome nonsense, but wow, can it be paralyzing. Yet, I psyched myself up to the point I could ignore that feeling, and sometime in April I began teaching myself basic HTML/CSS and JavaScript to see if this was something I should bother considering seriously. Turns out, I didn’t totally suck at it! And even better, I really liked it.
This wasn’t even a surprise, really. I’d played around with learning programming languages before and enjoyed it, and my favorite non-physical work activity has, for years, been making overly complicated Excel spreadsheets to track my team’s progress. Plus, I love problem solving — one of the best parts of being a carpentry supervisor is getting called over to a project and needing to pinpoint what small mistake is causing the whole thing to not work. It turns out debugging code functions in almost exactly the same way; it’s just that the questions you ask are about parentheses and equals signs instead of measurements and drill bit width.
The part I hadn’t expected was how much I liked the way learning how to code made me feel. I could feel my mind rearranging itself — creating new storage areas and different shortcuts between them. It felt the same as when I was trying to learn Spanish, except that the new pathways solidified both stronger and more quickly.
Encouraged, I tried giving myself a stricter learning schedule, but started to struggle with motivation and self doubt as what I was working on by myself got more complicated and I began desperately wanting someone around to answer questions. I shared this frustration with my wife who pointed out, extremely reasonably, “Honey, this is why schools exist.”
Obviously, she was right. If I was serious about learning, school had to be my next step. I knew I didn’t want to go back to college — even a two year program seemed horrifyingly long — so I started looking into bootcamps. The more I looked at their programs and read about people’s experiences, the more I felt like this could be something good for me.
After a lot of research, I decided Flatiron’s curriculum seemed like the best fit for me — I liked the focus on learning about why things worked, not just how to make them go. Now that I’m about to finish up the first two weeks of the program, I know I made the right choice. The feeling of coding rearranging my brain furniture hasn’t gone away, and it’s something I know I’ll be happy chasing for a long while. I don’t know exactly where I’m going within software engineering, but the longer I work at it, the more sure I become that there is a place here for me that will keep me on my toes in the way I crave, and I’m so excited to find it.
