How I Went From Stuck and Hopeless to Making My Tech Career Dreams Come True

When I graduated with my bachelor‘s degree in music technology, I felt stuck and hopeless about my career prospects. My niche degree had limited job opportunities, and with no technical skills or experience, I didn‘t know where to start to establish a stable career.

After struggling for a bit and teaching English abroad short-term, I found my way into tech. It took persistence, a willingness to learn new skills from scratch, and openness to pivotal career changes, but I‘m thrilled to say I‘ve made my once-farfetched tech career dreams come true.

Here is the story of my winding journey and how I went from feeling directionless and overwhelmed to fulfilled and thriving in my tech career as a full-stack developer.

Choosing a Niche Degree Left Me Unemployed After Graduation

When choosing university programs, I decided to study music technology because I had always been passionate about music. Over four years, I immersed myself in audio engineering, music production, multimedia, and web design. However, after graduation, I found myself in an unstable job market with distressingly few opportunities related to my niche degree.

According to data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), only 27.2% of 2020 music grads who applied for jobs actually secured employment. Of those employed, only 5.8% worked in their major field of study. The average starting salary for graduates from arts/performance/visual arts programs was $30,493 – nearly $8,000 less than the average across all majors.

My university‘s commencement speaker confidently told us we‘d all be fine and would forge our own career paths. But as I watched classmates take unpaid internships or move home with parents, her motivational words didn‘t ring true for me.

I felt my college degree was useless, and with no savings or professional connections, I had no idea how I‘d ever pay off towering student loans or establish a career for myself. It seemed like financial stability and fulfilling, meaningful work were completely out of reach.

Statistics from National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2020 survey

Teaching English Overseas Bought Me Time But Not Stability

Unsure what career path to pursue post-graduation, I decided to teach English abroad in Asia for a year. I mainly wanted to give myself time to determine my next steps while also paying the bills in the short term. Living overseas was undoubtedly an adventure, and the teaching job initially brought much-needed financial stability.

However, unexpected events caused my housing costs in Tokyo to suddenly skyrocket. I found myself living in a shockingly tiny and oppressively depressing 118-square foot apartment. Once again facing precarity, reality set in regarding the impermanence of my situation.

This experience caused me to do some deep reflection. I asked myself what I genuinely wanted in a fulfilling long-term career.

I realized that while I enjoyed teaching to some degree, the profession was notoriously draining over sustained periods of time. High teacher turnover rates also demonstrated a lack of stability in education roles. I also decided against pursuing music as a career after witnessing how difficult it was to break into such a saturated industry, even for incredibly talented artists.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for high school teachers in 2020 was only $61,820. Furthermore, the 10-year job growth rate for postsecondary teachers in music, art, drama, and dance is just 13% – much slower than average. This confirmed my instinct that education and music would not align with my personal goals.

Statistics from Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook

I knew I wanted a career path aligned with growing industries, offered long-term stability, and provided opportunities to work abroad occasionally. After extensive research, I decided to work toward breaking into the tech industry. Technology jobs were exploding in demand, had excellent earning potential even for entry-level roles, and remote opportunities were abundant.

Attempting a 180-Degree Career Pivot Into Tech Was Extremely Challenging

Armed with determination but no technical skills or training, I enrolled in a 2-year online computer science program to systematically learn software engineering skills. I hoped the structured curriculum would properly equip me with in-demand coding abilities so I could launch an entirely new technology career.

However, the learning curve starting out felt cruelly steep. In my first programming course covering fundamental coding concepts, I quickly realized I was struggling enormously to grasp key ideas others captured much more quickly.

Topics like conditional logic, loops, data types, and algorithms that first week triggered intense imposter syndrome. Having always shied away from math and logic courses in the past, diving headfirst into programming felt intimidatingly difficult.

When I met with the professor to discuss my options, he was thankfully understanding. We decided I should switch into the introductory programming track with a slower pace more suitable for true beginners. This setback my graduation target by nearly a year, but I needed more time to cement core CS foundations.

Although the slower course pace helped in time, self-doubts still frequently plagued me. As a career-changer with no previous industry experience, I wondered if I had what it takes to make it in such a rigorous field.

But I preserved and gradually made progress. Concepts that once seemed utterly perplexing started to click as I put in the hours and practiced repeatedly. The more code I wrote, debugged, and analyzed, the more comfortable I felt. My confidence slowly grew as I earned consistently high marks in all courses.

While I had made significant strides thanks to the program, I knew a classroom setting was still very different from real-world software engineering. I needed to get tangible experience, so I decided to start applying to internships before completing my entire degree.

First Tech Job: Surviving the Brutal Learning Curve as a Novice Developer

Through a combination of persistence and luck, I managed to land an iOS development internship at a promising startup despite only having academic coding knowledge. Joining this small but ambitious team as the only junior-level developer was thrilling but also incredibly intimidating.

I had to quickly get up to speed on essential platforms like Swift, Xcode, CocoaPods, and popular iOS frameworks while also absorbing the intricate existing codebase. Our development methodology followed Agile rituals like daily standups, sprint planning, and iterative releases. As a newcomer, following the process was a wholly foreign challenge.

My first assigned task was building a feature for an internal enterprise app from scratch while adhering to architectural principles like Model-View-Controller (MVC) separation. I worked relentlessly until it finally clicked how to take product requirements and translate them into functional, testable iOS code. Publishing my first app store build that engineers would actually use was an unbelievable feeling and marked a major confidence milestone.

While my learning curve was punishing at first, I had supportive mentors who helped me push through obstacles those initial months. Our fully remote team coordinated smoothly to launch the startup’s next-generation wellness tracking app for over 10,000 active users. Getting to deliver production iOS code as an intern confirmed this career change was the right move. My passion for programming continued growing as I stayed on full-time after the internship ended.

However, over time at this rapidly expanding startup, it became clear that company culture issues and limited iOS coding challenges would restrict my career advancement long-term. I routinely delivered quality features Meeting tight deadlines, yet despite strong technical contributions, I felt undervalued and knew my skills were stagnating. I decided it was time to level up again and pursue roles at industry-leading technology companies to keep propelling my budding career.

Studying Interview Prep Materials Rigorously to Get Noticed by Tech Giants

I set my sights on getting hired at a top high-growth technology company like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. But having interviewed unsuccessfully at Google before, I knew merely having some professional experience wouldn’t be enough. To stand out, I needed to intensely study computer science concepts like data structures and algorithms while practicing the actual interview format.

For most developers, efficiently solving complex coding problems on a whiteboard while explaining your thought process to evaluators feels utterly nerve-wracking. Cramming intensive preparation into an already packed work schedule was extremely taxing both physically and mentally.

But over two months, I fully committed to sharpening my technical knowledge and interviewing ability. I solved hundreds of algorithm challenges on LeetCode, read respected books like Cracking the Coding Interview cover to cover, and watched video explainers on complex data structures like tries, stacks, graphs, and trees.

I made sure to understand implementation trade-offs for things like arrays vs. linked lists, discussed developer best practices like writing clean, scalable, maintainable code in interviews, and became intimately familiar with dominating Big Tech interview questions asked at top companies.

I knew that with thousands of qualified candidates also aggressively prepping, the competition would be beyond fierce. Small mistakes or suboptimal code could instantly disqualify you no matter how strong your credentials looked on paper. The stakes felt terrifyingly high, but I managed anxiety by focusing efforts only on things within my control.

After months of determined and strategic interview practice, I felt confident tackling problems spanning topics like dynamic programming, backtracking, recursion, sorting/searching algorithms both iteratively and recursively. I started consistently excelling at interview screens with smaller sized companies. This was the ultimate proof to myself that I was finally ready to step up and audition for highly coveted roles at iconic tech giants like Google.

Stressful Yet Successful Tech Giant Interview Loop Leading to Dream Job Offer

After an extensive relationship-building process with internal recruiters, I secured an on-site interview loop with Google for a mid-level Android role. The 6-hour long succession of intensely difficult technical and behavioral interviews was the most stressful yet career-defining day of my life so far.

The hiring bar at ultra-selective Big Tech companies is nearly mythical with acceptance rates lower than Ivy League admission. Interview questions covered complex topics spanning custom data structures, scale estimation, system design concepts, and testing methodology.

I managed to excel in most sessions but also completely blanked when asked to code a recursive tree traversal algorithm with no prompting or hints from the interviewer. Coming out, imposter syndrome kicked into overdrive as I was terrified I had tanked my one shot after all those tireless months of preparation.

When the official job offer email arrived weeks later, I was in utter disbelief. The numerous rejection emails I had grown accustomed to made this watershed moment feel totally surreal. Getting into Google on my own technical merit after teaching myself to code a few years earlier validated that with relentless drive and calculated risk-taking, monumental career transitions are possible.

Now working as an Android developer for Google Cloud, I still have to actively pinch myself sometimes that this is my actual real life and not some ambitious pipe dream. But the proof is right there every morning when I log on to work on projects that impact millions of users. Making it here after such an improbable journey has shown me that your starting point rarely dictates your destination. With unwavering vision, patience, and sustained effort, even seemingly farfetched goals inch closer every day.