 It's five o'clock, last talk of the day, so thank you so much for sticking around and coming to this talk, how I quit my job and became a programmer in less than five months. Before I get started with this talk, I'd like to get a little bit of housekeeping out of the way. So first of all, Friday, make sure you stick around for the contribution sprints. There's a first-time sprint or workshop, too, if you've never done it before. And also, if you're in a talk about how to become a programmer, odds are, you probably are not a programmer right now, so you're probably wondering, what could I possibly offer a sprint? But there's always a ton of things that you can do sprint-wise. You can write docs. You can create a logo. You can do a lot of other stuff other than programming. So don't let that discourage you from participating. And then also, if you like this talk or if you didn't like this talk or any other talk, you can go to the survey. It is a survey monkey, survey monkey dot com dash r or slash r slash triple con Nashville, and then you can talk about what you liked, what you didn't, et cetera. So please make sure that you give feedback because that's how this conference is so awesome. They listen to feedback and they try to make y'all happy. So make sure that you go on there and you let them know. So to get started, hi, I'm Sessi Korea, Sessi Korea on Twitter, and I've done a lot of things in tech. I've been working in tech since 2009, so I'm coming up to my 10-year anniversary of being in this industry, and I've had a lot of jobs under the sun in tech. I've been a graphic designer, social media manager, as an account executive, I was an office manager, I was director of marketing, I was director of business development, and then now my title is software engineer. How? How do you do that? And then also, like, why so many jobs? So that's kind of what I'm going to talk a little bit about today. I'm going to talk a little bit about the transition, and hopefully that might help other people also make a transition. Maybe if it's not into specifically programming, maybe it's into a more technical role. So I hope that this talk can help you sort of make a plan to get you where you want to be career-wise. So before I get started sharing my journey, I want to get started with a story. So once upon a time, I worked at a really cool company. If you are, or if you have been in the Dribble community, you might have heard of the company Four Kitchens. There's actually some former Four Kitchens alumni here and some current Four Kitchens web chefs here as well. So that's the type of company it is. We, you know, even if you've been there a while or you've left, you know, it's a good company. We tend to stick together, and it was a great place to work, very talented people. I came in to do marketing, and I came in to a company that had a pretty good brand already. So as a marketer, that's kind of a dream come true. You come in and you get to work on a brand that's already really strong. So it was, in a lot of ways, a dream job. So I accomplished a lot of things that I was proud of. When I first got the job, I remember writing out a huge strategy document and just kind of outlining all the things that I wanted to do, and it was a pretty ambitious document. I can't say that I did all the things that I wanted to do, but I did a lot of them. So I was, you know, I felt like I was doing a good job. One of the things that I'm really proud of that I, you know, even see to this day, I organized the first Four Kitchens sponsored Dribble games at DribbleCon Portland in 2013, and I feel like that worked out so well for the company that even to this day, when I've been gone from the company for three years, you know, it's carried on. And I feel like that's a good testament to, you know, if you're doing something right, the fact that it continues to live on after you leave, that kind of makes you feel like, hey, you know, maybe I did something right. So having, you know, being good at my job and working at a good company with really great people, why would I leave that? Why would just absolutely just quit my job and go do something completely different than I've never done before? So to answer that question, I want to talk about mental health for a second. So the reason why I decided to make such a drastic transition within my career was because, personally, I was absolutely miserable. I had a good job, again, on paper. My life looked really great again, great job, great people, good brand, just marketers dream come true. But I personally was just not happy in just in my life. I there was a big disparity. I was kicking ass at my work. But in my personal life, I was just not really happy. And I couldn't really tell why for a long time. And I had a bit of a wake up call. This is a weird picture that I chose. But this is a this is the moment when I realized that I needed to change something. This is me actually on a work trip. I was in Bogota, Colombia to try to drum up some Latin American business. And I went to a national park with a coworker. And actually, that's a real llama. And like, I was, I was, you know, otherwise I would have been really happy to be on a real llama. And I gave my coworker the phone to take my picture. And then he gave me my phone. And I looked at the photo to put it on Instagram. And I was like, I look, I just look so like maybe you not maybe you can't tell. But when I look at myself there and I look at my eyes and I look at my face, like my eyes are dead. I have no color in my face. Like I'm just I when I saw that I was like, I need to change something. So to me, that was that was the wake up call. And I realized that I was in the wrong job for my type of personality. Now, what does that mean? So hello, I'm an introvert and I I work in marketing and I worked in marketing for about like five years. So and I never really set out to be a marketer. There's nothing wrong with it. I actually really enjoyed the work, but I never set out to do that. And I just kind of fell into it. And as a marketer, you're required to talk to people a lot. You talk to people at events, events have loud music. So you have to even pay more attention to what people are saying. You have to talk to clients. You have to talk to new clients. You have to go on meetings and pitch work. And then when you're not doing that, you're talking to your coworkers about other work that you're going to go and present. Like my life was talking to people pretty much all day. So yeah, that was absolutely the wrong job for me. And I just never really realized that that was the reason why I was unhappy and tired all the time and just not a very fun person to be around in my personal life. And that's because there's actually a talk today on how to succeed as an introvert in an extroverted world. I believe the name of the fellow is Aaron Campbell and he works for a work press. So I would recommend go check out that talk. I talked to him today and I think he talked a lot more in depth about what I'm about to cover, which is when you're an introvert, talking to people drains your batteries. So you need then time to be alone so that you can recharge. If you're an extrovert, talking to people recharges your batteries. And when you're alone, your batteries get drained out and then you need to go and talk to people, be around people to get your batteries recharged again. That's kind of how that works. So for me as an introvert, talking to people all the time for my job for three years was really, you know, having a toll on me. So that's when I kind of realized that, you know what? I need to change my career. And when I was thinking about that, I realized, you know what? I've actually always really wanted to code. I work in tech and I've been kind of circling programming like a hawk, but never really doing it, always kind of been a bridesmaid, never a bride. I've always like, and throughout these five years or so that I worked in tech, I would dabble just enough and code a little bit HTML, CSS here and there, just enough, but I never really took the plunge. And I'll go into why not a little later because this hopefully will help you in your journey as well as you start to try to learn how to program or pick up a new skill. So I always wanted to code and I knew, I knew that if I didn't give it a fair shot, like an actual fair shot, really try to do it, I would wonder all my life, could I do this? So I decided to take that plunge, quit my job and go try to become a programmer and learn how to code. So what I want to share with you is five questions that should help you guide you in your journey as you make a transition. So this is me and hopefully your journey as well. So first you got to figure out what type of developer you want to be. Then you have to understand your learning mindset and understanding your learning mindset will help you as you try to pick up a new skill because there's there's a type of man's mindset that you need to be able to learn how to program. And that's something that I had to learn the hard way. You also have to have an idea of what type of programming you want to do because knowing what sort of programming you want to do will determine what language you should learn. So then you should choose a language to learn. And then finally you have to figure out how to learn those skills that you need. So how do you learn? And that's what we'll be covering for the rest of the talk. So let's get started. What type of developer do you want to be? And by this I mean to sort of go back to thinking about are you an introvert or are you an extrovert or are you maybe somewhere in between? For me I'm an introvert with extroverted tendencies. I don't want to go code by myself in a basement for eight hours a day and not see people and not see the light of day. I do need some human interaction. So I kind of fall in between both. And then also whenever I talk to people about my decision to become a programmer based on my personality, I always say, hey, you know what, not all programmers are introverts. Some programmers are actually very extroverted. So it really depends on your personality type what type of work you should try to go pursue. If you're more of an extrovert, you might enjoy work more on the client facing side. So working out an agency, working out a consultancy, maybe doing freelance work or doing work where you're constantly interfacing with people like, you know, maybe a support engineer position or a sales engineering position, this would be great for you. If you're more on the introverted side, you might enjoy working on the product side of things where you don't really have to talk to clients on a day-to-day basis. You might also want to consider working in a smaller team or maybe even doing remote work from home type of work where, you know, maybe you're in your home office and you talk to people over Slack or something like that. So figuring out sort of like where you fall, which will sort of kind of guide what sort of jobs you should go and try to pursue. So once you figure that out, the next thing is trying to understand your learning mindset. And I'll try to explain what this means a little bit later with a story. But for now, let's just talk about the two types of learning mindsets that there are. I'm just going to sort of talk about what the two groups are and hopefully maybe you can start thinking which one you think you might fall under. So the first type is if you tend to think that there's only one right answer, you typically want steps to be in a repeatable way. You never stray from instructions. You like to be given instructions and you go and look at them and you go and do it just like by the book. And you tend to feel like failure is not an option. You tend to also internalize failure deeply or feel like failure is sort of like a failure on your part. Then there's also another group where you feel like there isn't just one right answer. There's many answers. Instead of being given repeatable steps, maybe you like to experiment a little bit. You don't really like to follow instructions. You tend to deviate from instructions, maybe not even look at them. And you feel like failure is just part of learning. You don't tend to internalize it as much. So the first group is what we call a fixed mindset. And the second group is what we call a growth mindset. And understanding where you fall will really help you as you try to learn how to program because if you're on a fixed mindset, it's going to be just a little harder. And this is why. If you have a growth mindset, you tend to feel like failure, again, it's just an opportunity to grow. It's not a big deal. And you tend to feel like there's not a limit to what you can learn. So you have a much easier time learning. If you have a fixed mindset, you feel like you really internalize that failure. So you feel like a failure is a sort of comment on your capabilities. It means that you are limited in your capabilities. And when you have a fixed mindset, it makes it that much harder to learn things like how to code because you're going to encounter a lot of roadblocks as you learn how to code. So what happened to me is that I realized that I had a fixed mindset and every time in my life that I had tried to learn how to code, which is something that I really wanted to do, whenever I would experience an issue, whenever I would try to follow along a tutorial and I just kind of couldn't do it, I just internalized it really deeply and I just felt like I just can't do it. I'm dumb, it's not for me, it's for someone else. And I just literally felt like there was a cap to how much I knew and programming was not one of those things. And then once I realized that I had a fixed mindset, I needed to learn how to break out of that. And you actually can. There's some things that you can do to try to break away from a fixed mindset. So how do you do that? First, you have to stop thinking in terms of right or wrong, black or white, especially when you want to learn how to program. And this is because there isn't just one answer when you're learning how to code. There's many answers. There's many ways of how to do things. And I actually stumble upon this whenever I teach. Now that I've learned how to program, I sometimes teach for an organization called Girl Develop it. And when I teach, I have students who sometimes are like, just give me the answer. And I'm like, well, there isn't one answer. There really isn't just one way to do things. And that's what I'm here to teach you. And usually students like that get very frustrated. So you really have to stop thinking in those terms of past fail, right, wrong, and try to start thinking more in terms of there's many solutions. You also need to start eliminating negative self-talk. One thing that I did, and I've seen my students do as well, is that whenever they make a mistake, they'll just say, oh, I'm so dumb. If you continually do that as you're learning, it's going to make it harder. And again, it's you internalizing that failure and blaming yourself for not being able to do something when you should see failure as more of an opportunity to grow. You made a mistake, no big deal. You learned from it. You move on. You learned something. So eliminating that negative self-talk can really help and help you start seeing that failure is growth. So reframing how you see learning and trying to have more of a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset can really help you, especially if you're trying to pick up a technical skill like programming or something along those lines. So now let's talk about what type of work you might want to do. So far we've maybe figured out if you want to do client phasing work or maybe more product side type of work, depending on your personality. Talked about how to think about learning. So let's talk about what type of work do you even want to do. And obviously what I'm about to share is not the end all be all, but hopefully it should kind of help you give you an idea of what type of work you would like. So I tend to think about it in this way. If you really like data, maybe right now you really enjoy working with spreadsheets. You're a spreadsheet wizard. You really like to think about or learn the inner working of things really deeply. Maybe you really enjoy reading about how things work together. If you're the type of person, you might really enjoy being a back end engineer. And if so, you're going to want to start by learning a programming language, like say something like PHP, Python, Ruby. If you really like to think more about interfaces, whenever you go to a website and you see a really nice slick menu and you're like, ooh, that's nice. And then you try to figure out how they might have made it fly here and there. And if you enjoy that type of work and that type of thinking, you might want to be a front-end engineer. And if so, you're going to want to learn markup language, like HTML, CSS. And then also couple that with programming with something like JavaScript to be able to make your markup sort of interactive. So that's sort of like what you're going to want to look for in your learning now. Now that you sort of kind of know what you want to do, you might pick a language to go and pursue. So choosing the right language to learn is also a pretty big decision because a lot of people, I feel, try to choose a specific language and then it doesn't work and then they just think that programming is not for them. So what I would say, and if there's anything that you take away from this talk, I hope that it's this. If at first you don't succeed, try a different language. So when I said earlier that I had tried many times back in my life to learn how to code and I would stumble upon a roadblock and then I would be like, oh, I'm just dumb. Each time that I tried to learn, I was trying to learn JavaScript. Guess what? I found out that it's not me that's dumb, it's just that I just, JavaScript did not click for me. JavaScript wasn't a good language, wasn't a good first language for me to learn. I then discovered Ruby and the first time that I saw Ruby, I was like, wow, this is really readable. I would like to know more about this piece and then I tried some exercises and then I found that I was really, that it was clicking, that it was easier for me to grasp those concepts and so I pursued Ruby as my first language to learn and then after that, I was able to sort of pick up the basics of programming because when you're learning how to code, a lot of the same principles are going to apply between languages. So just like JavaScript has functions, Ruby has methods and they take variables and they return you some data and there's classes and subclasses and things inherit from each other and all of those things are pretty much true in Ruby or JavaScript or Python or whatever. So once you have those basics, it becomes much easier for you to build on top of those basics. So I chose to go to a boot camp to learn Ruby and I spent three months learning Ruby and after that, I ended up getting hired at a place where they mostly coded in PHP. So I took maybe about a week learning PHP and then after that, I took maybe a couple of days brushing up on my JavaScript and now coming back to it after having learned Ruby and having learned the basics of programming, now I can write JavaScript. Now it's not a big deal but when I first started, I thought I was dumb because I just didn't get it and it just turned out that JavaScript just wasn't a language that clicked for me initially but now that I have the basics, I can build on top of that and I'm able to pick up new things much easier and that will also be true for you. So you just have to find a language that clicks for you and then after that, go back and revisit all languages that you struggled with. So now let's talk about how to learn. So we've talked about maybe what language you might want to do, what type of coding you want to do but how do you get to that place? How do you actually learn? And for this, I would like to start by asking three questions and based on that answer, you should hopefully come up with a little bit of a plan on how to go about learning the programming language of your choice. So the questions are, can you get unstuck on your own? What is your timeline for learning? And also, how much accountability do you need? Knowing the answer to those three questions should sort of help guide how you go about learning. So based on possible answers to those questions, I came up with three personas. You might fall squarely in one of them. You might be a mix of both. So let's look at those. If you require little to no supervision, you can pretty much learn on your own. If you encounter an issue or you get stuck with something, you're usually able to get yourself unstuck. You have a long or no timeline. You don't really need to make the transition by a certain time and you're highly accountable to yourself. I would call you an autodidact. And I would say that you probably are good learning from a book. There's also other resources like Codecademy, Code School. These are both resources where you're giving a prompt and then right next to the coding prompt, you can write your code and the code editor will tell you if it's right, if it's wrong and then you can go along at your own pace and learn that way. Just like that, there's also a plural site. That's just videos. There's no coding prompts. And there's another great resource called Code Wars. And that one is also just coding prompts. And then you put in your prompt and then you can see other people's answers to how they solve that issue. And then that can also help you sort of level up in your coding. So this is a little bit of what Codecademy looks like. Again, there's not a lot of interactivity here. It's literally just a prompt. You write your code, you get an answer. So this works, again, well, if you're very good at learning on your own. Code School is a little bit more interactive in that it has videos. And then after the video, you get a coding prompt as well. But you don't really get to ask questions. So again, if you're really good at learning on your own, these could be good resources for you. Now, if you're kind of... You need to ask questions sometimes, but not all the time. You maybe have a bit of a moderate timeline. You do want to do it by a certain time, but you're a little bit flexible on that timeline to learn. And you're moderately accountable to yourself. Maybe you need a poke every now and then. Some resources to help you would be Thinkful.com. I actually took a Thinkful course at one point. To brush up on my front-end skills. And I highly recommend it. It is all online. It's self-paced. But you actually get assigned a mentor that you meet with every week for about half an hour, an hour, depending on the program. And you get to ask questions. So what I loved about that program is that, again, it's self-paced. It's all online, so I could do it after work. And I got to ask questions of someone once a week. At that point, I didn't really need someone there every day for me to ask a question. So if you're kind of more like, yeah, you need to ask some questions, but not all the time, this might be a really great way for you to learn. Another resource that I really like is FreeCodeCamp.com. FreeCodeCamp is a free code camp that's online. And essentially, they have three tracks. They have a front-end track. They have a back-end track. And then they have a sort of actual work track. Once you finish everything, they have you kind of do a project for a nonprofit. And what I really love about them is that it's free. It's self-paced. But also, they have an online community where you can go and ask questions. And also, a lot of cities have a weekly or monthly sort of meetup for people that are going through FreeCodeCamp so you can go and meet other people that are also learning. So I feel like this is a great way, again, if maybe you do want to ask questions, but you kind of want to go on a self-paced type of thing and your timeline is a little bit flexible. There might be a girl develop a chapter in your city. I used to be a chapter leader for girl develop it. And I can tell you it's not just for girls. It's actually for adult women, 18 years and over. And we also will take anybody that wants to learn. So it doesn't matter if you're a woman or not. You can take girl develop a classes as well. So they're a great resource. There's also just meetups. Check out meetup.com. If there's a specific language that you want to learn, I bet you there's going to be a learn X meetup in your town. And if there isn't, start one. You can start by saying, hey, we're going to make our way through X book and we'll talk about it every week. So then that can also sort of help you try to get over those humps. There's also part-time classes. There's specifically in my city there's a part-time boot camp and more and more boot camps are offering part-time classes because they realize that not everybody has the ability to quit their job and go to a boot camp for three months. And this is a screenshot of what Free Code Camp looks like. Again, I think it's a really neat resource. Now, if you are one of those people that does require sort of like a classroom environment to learn, I'm one of those people. If I really need to learn something, I really just want to go take a class, absorb everything that there is to absorb about it and then after that I can go on my own and start learning more about it. That's kind of how I learn. So I did end up going to a boot camp. I went to a three-month boot camp. I wanted to be able to ask questions when I got on stuck or when I got stuck. And I also wanted to be held accountable for something. So if you're that type of person, that you need someone to poke you and make sure that you're actually learning and doing things, this might be a good resource for you. Now, again, not everybody is able to just go and take a boot camp. And a lot of people don't know if it's right for them. And I would say that, yeah, it definitely is not the right fit for everybody. I also wanted to talk about whether coding boot camps are worth it or not. And being the product of a boot camp myself, I could tell you that it depends on the boot camp. So this is actually my boot camp. It was actually pretty small. It's actually defunct now. And yeah, we had a very small class. And I learned a lot. It absolutely changed my life, but it's not for everybody. There were a lot of people that didn't graduate from the class. There were a lot of people that didn't end up getting a job in tech. I think that you definitely get out of it what you put in. So, and it also depends on why you're going to the boot camp. There's a lot of hype around boot camps. Since I went to a boot camp, I often get emails from people who say, hey, you should talk to my friend, Sesi. She did a boot camp. You should talk to her about what it was like. And usually when I talk to those people, I ask, why do you want to do it? And if the answer that I get is, oh, because I want to get a six-figured job after I graduate, I'm like, nope. You're doing it for the wrong reasons. And this is, I feel like boot camps in certain cities where the standard of living is higher might be able to claim that their grads get out and get a six-figured job after graduation. But depending on your market, you're probably most likely not going to get a six-figured job when you graduate. You're probably going to get more of an entry-level type of salary. And that's absolutely what you should expect. So if you're going with the idea that you're going to graduate and all of a sudden make all this money, and then you're going to find that it's even really hard to get an internship as a junior engineer, you might end up quitting and you might have just spent $20,000 to go to a boot camp and it really wasn't the right decision for you. So I would say, think about why you're doing it. Think about what you want to get out of it. The other thing that I noticed about the people that I went to boot camps, to the boot camp with, is that if they did the bare minimum, they had a much harder time trying to get a job after. So if you go and you literally are just going through, just you turn in your assignments, but you're not really putting in the time to really learn, to really ask questions or to go deep into the things that you're really interested in, you might come out and you might still have, hey, here's, I have a final project, I have some pieces for my portfolio, someone hire me, you're going to have a bad time. You're going to want to dedicate that time that you have to actually learn something, to figure out where you fall and figure out what it really interests you. So for example, the boot camp students that I see succeed are students that realize that they really like databases and then during the time in the boot camp, they become the database guy and they just go and they, they're taking three months out of their life to go and learn something. So then they go really deep into learning this thing and they come out the other end and they can say, hey, I went to this boot camp and yes, I learned all these things, but also I got really into databases and I really learned them and here's, here's something that I'm really passionate and interested in. So again, you get what you put in. So I would say that the biggest thing though that I did learn when I went to a boot camp is learning how to learn. This is where I learned that I had a fixed mindset. It was the first thing that my instructor did, take this quiz, figure out where you fall and I realized, oh, I have a fixed mindset. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to learn and I reframed my mindset and I was able to really take in the information, really tell myself that I could do it and I was able to overcome that initial hurdle of trying to learn and coming into a roadblock and realizing, hey, I can overcome this and this is a learning opportunity. So this way I learned how to learn and once I got out into the job market and I got my first job as a software engineer and I say it in quotes because I'm uncomfortable calling myself a software engineer because I didn't go to engineering school but whatever, that's my title. What I came out of that boot camp experience with is that, hey, you know what? I might not have all the answers, I might not know everything right now but I know that I can learn it. So that's been sort of my mantra throughout this career transition. So I would say, I'll get back to this thought. Once you get out, once you've learned what you wanted, how do you go about getting the job? So when you're trying to transition, having had a career before, what I see a lot of people do is they don't know how to talk about their previous experience. They say, well, you know, I used to be a teacher and now I'm a programmer. Like I can't really, can I put that on my resume? Can I talk about that in my job interviews? And yeah, absolutely. You just have to sort of reframe your previous experience as experience relevant to your job as a programmer. So, for example, for me, I had a lot of experience talking to people talking to clients and I ended up getting a job doing support engineering for a public API. So part of the job required me to talk to developers. So I was able to say, hey, you know what? I actually have a lot of experience talking to people about very technical issues and then taking that to the team. So now in this job as a support engineer, I absolutely have the soft skills to talk to people and now I also have the tech skills to maybe help them troubleshoot and that's how I ended up getting that job. So you have to find that link of your previous experience to the job that you're currently doing or applying for. You also need to be able to explain the value of your potential. So if you are someone that transitioned from a different career, you taught yourself something or you went to school to learn it and you came out the other end with these skills and you're transitioning to a different career, that takes a very specific, very dedicated type of person and that is a person that anybody hiring should look for because what this tells you is that this person can learn on their own they're dedicated and they found a way to be accountable for their goals and they met their goals. Tell me that's not a person that you don't want to work with. This person is highly motivated to make a change and they made the change and they're able to learn on their own and I feel like that is something that people don't often talk about when you're talking about someone that's transitioning into a more technical role or transitioning from something else into programming. You have a tremendous learning potential so being able to explain that potential is going to be really helpful as you try to go out into the job market. So what I wanted to go back to earlier when I was talking about sort of my transition is was it worth it? And I would say that yes, it was absolutely worth it for me. The experience of taking time off from my job and really going deep into learning something and coming out the other end with skills and being able to make a transition into something that I actually wanted to do I would say yes. Higher junior developers because they say well I don't have the time to train them I want someone that can just start contributing from day one and if more companies start prioritizing or not necessarily prioritizing but just plain hiring junior devs yes it's going to take you some time to get them up to speed but you're going to be able to train them in how you actually want to do that so it kind of goes back to talking about like you're hiring a bootcamp grad or someone transitioning their career for their potential later on not necessarily for what they know now you're hiring them because you know that they can learn so changing companies and changing how they think about junior devs and seeing them as more of like an asset and seeing them as also as an investment I'm going to hire this junior developer it might take me a little bit longer to get them up to speed but we have some sort of framework to actually get them up to speed so for example I ended up getting a job the company where I currently work for through an internship and that worked so well that we hired my backfill sort of like in the same way so now what we're doing whenever we want to hire someone else on the team is that we're looking to try to bring in another another junior dev and we know that it's going to take maybe a few months to get them up to speed but we know they're going to kick ass and we know that we're going to be that much better for it but also our like I said our company has kind of like that structure to be able to mentor so I would say like making sure that your company prioritizes mentorship as well is really important there is something else in that whole like junior dev type of thing oh yes you can try to use services like gap jumpers and if you are transitioning your career and you're looking for a place where to go and look for jobs use gap jumpers it's blind reviews for jobs so you essentially you apply for a job but the company that you're applying to doesn't see your resume they just see your code so what that helps do is that it gets rid of unconscious bias so for example in the last time that we try to hire someone we use this service and they just sent us a bunch of SIP files with some code and we picked the ones that we liked and then we talked to people and then once we found that someone we like then we actually got their resume and I remember talking to my engineering manager at that point and he said oh yeah the guy that we really liked if I had seen his resume I would not have called him because on paper it didn't look like he had much experience so using services like that can really be helpful because when people are transitioning careers they're going to be looking at your specific like skills or whatever previous experience you had and if you're transitioning careers you might get overlooked because they're expecting to see you know I don't know some previous jobs in coding so trying to have like a hiring process that encourages blind reviews can be also really helpful to like get these people in the door that's a great answer thanks for the gap driver's tip the one little commentary I'd offer is I think maybe just as like there's great inflation and like it gets easier and easier to get an A over time like there's a kind of a title on inflation too yeah like the junior developer kind of slips off the bottom of the scale and they kind of expect everybody to start as a senior bit yeah yeah I would say overall in our industry we have a really hard time leveling people up we kind of expect them to come in at like this you know maybe a higher level and I don't think that it always used to be this way but certainly I think that in the last few years it's become kind of that and it's kind of sad you have a question as well you talked about this a little bit as far as when you went to boot camp you learned in Ruby then when you got hired in the shop they were a Ruby shop they did PHP could you just talk a little bit more about how easy or difficult it was to move from language and did you feel like you started in the wrong place when you learned Ruby first and that kind of thing yeah I don't think that I started in the wrong place at all I was looking for a language that made sense to me and Ruby made sense to me because it's very readable Python is also similarly written in a way that's meant to be readable Ruby specifically as a community and as a culture really emphasizes readability of the code over other things so I was like oh I am learning and I want to know more about this language where people want to write in a more readable way and I thought that would be a great place for me to go and learn but then once I picked up so to answer the question of like do I think that I chose their own language to start with I don't think so because it taught me the basics of programming and I still use it every day for like my personal projects but then you know I ended up getting higher at a shop where they do mostly PHP and what I did when I was learning PHP is that I actually went on plural site and I just watched their intro PHP videos and then when I was coding on my own so that kind of just taught me the syntax and then whenever I would start coding on my own I would literally look up x, y, and c Ruby PHP equivalent and then that's how I learned how to like slowly try to build up my PHP expertise so to a point now whenever I was like after PHP I was trying to learn Python to fix an issue in one of our Python libraries so then I was typing in PHP x, y, c Python equivalent so that's kind of how you end up as a programmer like once you learn those basics then it becomes a lot easier to know what to look for whenever you're trying to pick up a new language any other question? all right well thank you so much