Daniel D. Pence

People often ask me how I changed careers from Finance to Software Engineering. My usual response is brief: “a little luck and a lot of hard work”. Of course, there’s more to the story. In this post, I’ll walk you through how I left a six-year stint in Finance and launched a new career as a front end web developer in the span of 12 months.

March 4, 2014 my world changed forever. This was the day my first son was born. It was an incredible day, and a day I will always remember. But like most new dads, I was soon confronted with the new reality of the responsibility that comes with raising a child.

I was in my sixth year working as a Financial Analyst at a Fin-tech startup. My days had become incredibly mundane, repetitive, and my work lacked any real meaning. The hope I once had that our startup would be acquired and my options would become my ticket to an easy retirement had all but faded.

I was burned out.

After my son was born, I began to ask myself the question, “is this really what I want to do with the rest of my life?”. Work zapped all my energy. I came home each night drained with nothing left to give to my wife or son. That wasn't fair to them. They deserved better. Did I want my kid to grow up watching his dad be miserable in his career? It didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that I needed to do something different.

So what was I going to do? Go into financial planning? Sales? Start a business? Go back to school?

At some point in the months that followed, I recalled a conversation I had with a coworker a couple years prior in which he said he had spent his weekend learning to code on this cool new platform called Treehouse. I quickly did some research on average software engineer salaries and available jobs in the area. “Impressive”, I thought, “let’s see what this Treehouse thing has to offer.”

At the time, Treehouse offered a 30-day free trial. Determined to give it a fair shake, I signed up and made a deal with myself. If I could stick with it for 30 days and still be interested, that would probably be a good indication that it’s career field worth pursuing.

And so I dove in, starting with a course titled “How to build a website”, where I learned basic HTML and CSS. As my eyes were opened to this whole new world of web development, I quickly became hooked. It didn’t take but a few weeks for me to realize that I really enjoyed this stuff and could seriously see myself changing careers.

But I needed a goal: be hireable as a web developer within 12 months.

Over the course of the next few months, I worked my way through as many tutorials as I possibly could, making sure my $25 per month subscription was maximized.

I continued to learn more about HTML and CSS. And Sass. And JavaScript. And jQuery. Oh my. Then I learned about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I read books, listened to podcasts, followed industry leaders, watched hours of YouTube videos. And most importantly, I built websites and applications, and put it all on my own personal portfolio site.

To say that I was consumed by this new adventure would be an understatement. But I’m the type of person that goes all-in on something when I believe in it. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. With the support of my wife, I dedicated many hours throughout each week to continuing the self-directed learning process.

After approximately 10 months of learning through Treehouse and other resources, I felt confident enough in my skillset to begin searching and applying for jobs. I knew I didn't know everything, but that was okay. I just needed to get my foot in the door somewhere, with a company who believed in growing developers, where it would be safe to make mistakes, and where I could learn what it takes to write and maintain quality software.

As fate would have it, I didn't have to search too far. While searching the local job boards, I saw a post for a position that looked like a good fit, at a company I respected. I didn't meet the experience requirement. I didn't have all the skills listed in the job description. But I applied anyway. I figured the worst-case-scenario was they would say no.

So on April 1st, 2015, I applied for a Front End Developer position with Ramsey Solutions. To my surprise, about a week later, I was contacted for an introductory phone screen interview with a technical recruiter. And it went well. Really well. Over the course of the next three and a half months, I went through the lengthy interview process at Ramsey, and officially accepted an offer for a new job as an Associated Front End Developer on July 27th, 2015.