How I Decided to Quit My Job as a Banker and Learn to Code

In 2014 I graduated from Whitman College with a degree in economics and was off into the real world. Like many graduates, I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I had confidence that if I just tackled things one day at a time then I’d figure it out eventually. Luckily I ran cross country and track all through high school and college so even at the age of 22 I was pretty good at setting goals and working diligently towards them. One goal that was always in-mind after graduation was to figure out what I wanted to do. I knew from observation and from talking to my peers and my parents that many people graduate undergrad college without having an ideal job they wanted, let alone a “passion” to pursue. So what would end-up happening to these folks is that they get a job that relates to their undergraduate major and would work in that industry for the rest of their lives, without having really conciously chosen it. I knew I didn’t want that for myself. I always followed the Steve Jobs ethos of “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it”. So my primary goal upon graduating was to find out where to focus my time and energy. If I had to pick an industry or field to focus on for the rest of my life then I’d better chose carefully.

After graduation I worked a wide array of jobs in many different fields. I worked at a call center, worked at a running shoe store, drove for Uber, worked at a cleaning company, worked for a real estate developer, went door to door for a presidential campaign, worked at a commercial real estate mortgage broker, worked at a private equity firm, and most recently worked as a banker. That’s a count of nine jobs in four years. These jobs are almost entirely unrelated. Most people would look at my resume and think I was crazy, fickle, or afraid of commitment. To me this criticism doesn’t really matter. It makes total sense that any young person would go through at least 10 discrete jobs before finding the right path. What does matter is that with every job I obtained valuable skills in accounting, communication, business, sales, writing, reading, discipline, orgnization, prioritization, etc. I always knew that I could learn in any situation and that these sorts of skills would pay great dividends down the road. Thus, it was never a waste of time to work in career paths or jobs that I eventually would quit, as I’m sure many people would see this type of situation.

Well it was in late 2017 that I read How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil and had my mind blown. In this book Kurzweil goes into the technical details of how the human brain works and how software can be used to create artificial intelligence. Reading this book made me realize the absolutely world-changing and still largely-untapped potential for software. It was right then that I decided I had to learn how to code and commit myself 100% to this field.

In a nutshell that’s how I came to decide to learn to code. To me, finding out what you want to do is the hard part. The easy part is doing it. So at this point in late 2017 I’ve made a decision. Now how to get to my goal of being a professional software developer? Without doing too much research I jumped in. I started with Free Code Camp, learning HTML and CSS. Well I got bored of that rather quick. So I saught out something harder and more computer-science-ie. I started learning Python with a great book called Automate the Boring Stuff by Zeiwag. I fell in love. It’s a great book to learn to code that I highly recommend for beginners. I committed myself to learning to code on nights and weekends outside of my day job as a banker, so it was great to have a book to guide me and give me projects to work on. But eventually I finished the book and completed all the projects. At that point I hit a major wall. My workload at the bank was ramping up and I didn’t know how to progress further, especially with limited time and energy after work. As many beginners realize, once you finish the basic guided tutorials the only way to progress further is to build your own projects. Well that takes a lot of energy, especially as a beginner. And I didn’t have enough hours in the day to do well at my day-job and to keep learning to code. So for a few months I stalled. I didn’t know how I was going to reach my goal of becoming a professional developer. So I tried to find an intermediate step from where I was to where I wanted to be. I did all sorts of research on jobs at tech companies that I would quality for. Jobs like product manager or financial analyst. I figured it would be much easier to prove myself in a tech company with my existing skill-set and then make a lateral move into software development within that same company. I was working on that idea for several months when I talked to a friend of a friend who was looking for newer software developers who were willing to get paid below-market rates. Boom! That’s me. I was all in for this and I saw my opening. I sold myself to this guy and asked what I needed to learn to get the position. He told me to focus on JavaScript and ReactJS, and that we could have an interview in a few weeks. This jolted me into action. I immediately started JavaScript and ReactJS tutorials on Codecademy. I finished them all, even the premium content. I didn’t think I was ready for an interview but I figured I could sell myself on my discipline, tenacity, and work ethic. I may not have known JavaScript and ReactJS all that well but I would in a matter of time. I could guarantee that. Well for various reasons that interview never came. But I had newfound hope. One of my problems when I started was that I didn’t know what kind of development I wanted to do. What would be appropriate for a beginner like me to aim for? Should I keep learning Python? What was the most realistic path from beginner to professional? I talked to friends who were developers, friends who were data scientists, friends who were product managers and tech entrepreneurs, and even tech recruiters. While they all gave me valuable information, none of them could really say definitively how I could accomplish my goal of becoming a professional software developer. I finally came back around to Free Code Camp. I was listening to a Free Code Camp podcast with Quincy Larson when he explained why Free Code Camp focused on JavaScript and web development. I was already starting to think that web development was the best way for beginning developers to get started. So when Quincy eloquently and confidently explained that Free Code Camp focused on web development because web developers are in high demand and JavaScript keeps growing in popularity and usability I was sold. I also realized on a practical level that with web development I could build my own cool websites and web apps that would be easy to host and for other people to actually use. I could never quite see how I could use Python to build anything other than small scripts that would be difficult to share. So my motivation to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was really high. I still had a large workload at my day job as a banker. I didn’t want to sacrifice the quality of my work at my day-job, so I frequently stayed late at work and put a lot of energy into making sure I did a good job. I did well enough to get promoted into a sales position with even more responsibility, even as I had my eye on the door. This was a great confidence boost to me, but it meant even less time and energy could be used to code. So I needed to find an alternate route. I just didn’t have the time to build the projects I knew would get me to my goal. It’s at this point that I realize I’ve saved a decent amount of cash and that my brother was living on nearby Catalina Island. After doing the math and putting a lot of thought into it, I decided to quit my job, move-in with my brother on a remote island, live super cheap, live off my savings, and code full-time.

So here I am. I currently live in a small town on a small island with nothing to do but code. I’ve completed the Free Code Camp Resposive Web Design certification, Javascript Algorithms and Data Structures certification, the Front End Libraries certification, and soon I will complete the rest of the Free Code Camp curriculum. I’ve also completed dozens of CodeWars challenges in Python and JavaScript, I’ve at least begun a few exciting side-projects. And I’m overall extremely happy with my decision to quit my job as a banker and learn to code. Stay tuned for more advice and hopefully more technical posts on this blog.

Feel free to reach out to me or to checkout my work at my personal website. I look forward to connecting with you. Code on!

Written by Spencer Corwin, web developer for hire.