How I Became a Self-Taught Software Engineer at a Major Tech Company

…and how you can too.

Up until now I’ve been working in non-technical role. After studying for many months, I just got my first engineering job at a major Bay Area tech company. This journey has been rewarding but incredibly difficult. For any of you hoping to do the same, here’s how you can land your coveted software engineering job too.

A little background…

Why engineering?

I’ve always been interested in logic, numbers, and critical thinking. I loved “whodunit” puzzles as a kid. While studying for my undergraduate degree in Finance, I built some pretty gnarly things in Excel using Visual Basic. That experience was my first exposure to how frustrating syntax errors could be, and how rewarding it is when something you write finally works! I took pride in thinking, “these hands built this!”

When I made this career change, I was a Customer Success Manager at Salesforce. My career to this point has been working with customers and products, but much less so on the technical side.

These past couple of years I felt that I wasn’t challenging myself enough in the work I was doing, and I really missed that feeling of building things. I decided to sign up for a RailsBridge workshop in San Francisco, and though I didn’t know anything about Rails (or programming, quite frankly), I loved every minute of it.

Soon after, one of my software engineer friends pointed me to some of his favorite learning resources online. The spark was ignited.

I began by spending 20–25 hours per week studying and building things, all while working full time. I considered going the bootcamp route, but I didn’t want to quit my job at the time. I also wanted built-in test of “if I really like writing software, I’ll stay committed to this.”

When I finally got to the job application process, I got rejected several times. That was an emotional rollercoaster in its own right. However, I stuck with it and…