Why I Career Changed - Project Manager to Software Developer

This is the story of why I did it.

All of this happened after working as a dishie, door to door salesperson, being in the army reserves, doing an internship at Virgin Australia and breaking away from my peers to join tech. Stories for another day.

I grappled with the big question a lot of young brisbanites face: move to a big city like Sydney or Melbourne or stay.

I decided to stay. I was lucky that the tech scene seemed to be thriving in Brisbane. There was a cool grad program on offer where I'd rotate all around the different teams in the organisation. Marketing, Customer Support, Sales and even a month in an overseas office.

After a year and the completion of the grad program I joined the Enterprise team as a project manager. God we were busy. And dare I say, it was kinda stressful too. In a not so good way.

Lucky me, this was a cross-functional team. We had devs, sales people, subject-matter specialists and project managers all working together to help big clients (think 500-10,000 employees) get up and running.

This was the first time I saw the scale of the impact that developers had.

While I was helping a client with maybe a few thousand employees, even the smallest changes that developers made went out to tens of thousands of people at once.

That was captivating.

It also amazed me that developers seemed to be paid to learn stuff. Every single day that they came in, they'd work on a new problem and learn a new thing.

Ultimately I decided I needed to make the jump. I spoke to a lot of people first. Did my research and decided that going to a coding bootcamp seemed to be the most efficient way to break in to tech.

And here we are today.

We'll talk about the risks and pitfalls you may face when career changing into tech another day.

If you're in Australia I hope you're keeping warm!

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