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My first job out of college I was a help desk guy on track to become a sysadmin. As fate would have it, an opportunity came to let me transition into a coding r
by decafninja 5y ago
My first job out of college I was a help desk guy on track to become a sysadmin. As fate would have it, an opportunity came to let me transition into a coding role*. The rest is history. I am so incredibly thankful for this happening and I think my career turned out significantly better both in terms of compensation and enjoyment than my friends/colleagues who stayed on the sysadmin path.
*Back then there was no concept of leetcode interviews. Otherwise, this transition would probably have been extremely unlikely.
- culopatin 5y agoThis is the path I want to be in but like you said, very unlikely. People see IT in my resume and move on to the next guy.
- decafninja 5y agoI don't think that would be the problem. I have both read about, and personally witnessed, people of completely non-technical backgrounds (ex-chef, ex-aesthetician, ex-Uber driver, etc.) get SWE jobs - even at FAANGMULA companies at that. The reason I used the word "unlikely" is in the context of leetcode interviews being the gatekeeper nowadays. That wasn't the case when I made the jump. That ex-Uber driver, ex-chef, etc. all became SWEs despite their backgrounds because they were able to successfully grind leetcode enough to pass the technical interviews. If you can too, then there's no reason why you couldn't become a SWE also. However, it is definitely easier said than done. More recently and personally, I have a friend who used to be ex-QA for Facebook. He was given chances to jump to a SWE role, but failed to do so because he couldn't pass the leetcode interviews. But the opportunity was there.