Here are my 3 reasons.
It was time. It had been too many days in a row that I’d been unexcited, uninterested, and uninspired by what I was about to do that day. I’d learned about this measuring stick of fulfillment from this Steve Jobs quote:
“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
I found this idea helpful in the past and a valuable way to know when you’re stagnating and when it might be time to switch things up in life.
I was ready to have an in-demand skill set for now and the future; it had to be something with obvious market value. Essentially, I wanted what my wife Heather has. She’s a technical writer and instructional designer with a niche specialty in designing learning and documentation for technically-rigorous fields and she’s always been flush with opportunities and attractive to prospective employers.
I was considering various options for a while, including going back to school to become a doctor of physical therapy, which would be an expansion on my original field of exercise physiology. But $100,000 or more in tuition and more than 5 years in school, plus getting licensed, was a big investment of time and money that did not align with what I wanted for my life at that time.
Fortunately, a more ideal choice would present itself to me soon, one where the potential was great and the return on investment a no-brainer. Here are my 3 reasons why I decided to become a software developer.
Reason #1 – Fascination
As an INTP Myers-Briggs type, I naturally gravitate towards science and technology. My fascination and enthusiasm for these areas run deep and go way back.
As a teenager, I was overjoyed and obsessed with disassembling and reassembling my first PC (often to my poor mom’s chagrin especially when I broke a component and it had to be replaced) and learning how to make it do things with MS-DOS. DOS was a curiosity to me, a puzzle and a challenge, and I spent countless hours studying various books and manuals trying to learn what else I could do with the oh so mysterious C:> prompt.
The programming classes I took in high school provided further hooks for intrigue to develop. And as an adult, before officially beginning my coding journey at Flatiron School, I had fun, sometimes successfully, tinkering with the front and back ends of websites for my various businesses.
Today, my favorite newsletter to read is Hacker Newsletter. It’s a once-a-week email with curated articles on technology and programming. I’d been a subscriber for a while before deciding to enroll at Flatiron and every week when HN hit my inbox, I always found myself wanting to know more about programming, to understand what the technical pieces in the newsletter were talking about.
Over the years I’ve also enjoyed reading biographies and watching documentaries of the greatest computer technology icons of our time including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And, as I grow as a developer, I’m super excited to know more about how the mobile apps, websites, and other software I use frequently are built.
Reason #2 – Continuation
From 2006 through the early 2010s, I was mentored by a sophisticated entrepreneur/executive who had been building and selling software companies since the early 1980s. This valuable mentoring increased my insight into the business of software and technology and played a major role in my professional development.
In 2014, I co-founded a startup in the recruiting technology space. I co-led all aspects of bringing a complex SaaS (Software as a Service) offering to market, including brand creation, product development, patent and trademark filings, marketing, hiring, fundraising, and operations.
This venture was my first direct exposure to modern front-end and back-end design and programming and I strove to absorb all I could about how the product was built. So I see this foray into learning how to develop software at Flatiron as a natural continuation into a field with knowledge and possibilities that excite me.
Reason #3 – Exploration
Software engineering as a possible career choice revealed itself to me spontaneously one morning after a yoga practice. It’s one of those moments when an obvious solution just pops out from the depths of your subconscious.
I’m not happy in work and in life unless I’m constantly learning, growing and discovering, helping, solving problems, and indulging my curiosity. The pace of change in software technology requires these attributes to stay on top of your game. What better field to satisfy and leverage my natural skills and strengths than software development?!
To me, the journey to becoming a developer means new challenges, people, knowledge, technology, and opportunities to bring my hard-earned experience solving problems to bear on meaningful projects.
Software engineering demands continuous exploration and discovery of new ideas, techniques, languages, and approaches. The errors, bugs, problems, fixes, and challenges are endless, which just might be the only scenario that could possibly keep me interested and excited about what I’m about to do every day!
So to sum up, the reason why this guy in his 40s wants to become a software developer is because of an innate fascination with the field, a desire to continue building on what I’ve already done, and to explore by doing a deep dive on the fun, challenging, and exciting world of code.