Starting in tech a few years "late"

Late Bloomer

As a child I always wanted to be an architect. My mother is an artist and my father works in construction. I wanted to blend the two together. I thought it would be fun and I liked to draw. My skills in drawing faded as quick as my interest in architecture when my dad brought home our first computer. It ran Windows 95 and I thought it was *the* coolest thing ever. I was fascinated, and since I loved video games my parents bought some for me to play on the PC. As the years went by, my love for games grew. I remember coming home to play World of Warcraft after school and playing until my home work was due the next day. I loved it. 

My first love was video games, but I quickly found another with music. I never played an instrument, but I mostly enjoyed listening and dissecting lyrics. Feeling the emotion of some through music really meant a lot to me. 

High school came and went with plenty of woes, highs, and all the in between, and I had to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. A big burden to put on the shoulders of a seventeen year old (or anyone for that matter). I had no idea. I thought something with electronic hardware would be cool. 

With my poor grades and lack of direction, I decided to go a local community college for electrical engineering, then electronic technologist, then bio medical technology. I didn't really like any of them (I mean they are all very similar, I wish I would have realized they were sooner). After a little break from school, I had a brilliant idea. I would do something similar to what I wanted when I was young.

I was going to be a music producer/recording engineer.  I mean I have a great understanding of computers and I love music. This was it. *This* was what I was going to do. I realized after a short while that it wasn't. In the words of my favorite professor at the school, "You have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time a thousand times before you are in the right place at the right time to make it in music."\
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When I first heard that I thought, "That's cool, I'll do that. No problem. I want this." The only thing was I didn't realize how few and far between each of those times are. I gave up. I couldn't do it anymore. I took quite a long break from school and worked a few dead end jobs. They paid all right and living at my parents wasn't that bad, but I had bigger dreams than that. I wanted more. I wanted a lot more. 

After a few years of job jumping, I decided I would go back to school. It was a big decision to do that, it was scary, I was comfortable with what I had going for me at the time. I knew it would be tech and after a quick stint of networking, I found programing. It was love at first byte. The first program that I got to work was the coolest thing. It was such a rush to get it to work. I realized I had found it. **This** was it. This was the thing I was going to do for the rest of my life.

Before I graduated, I found an internship as a full stack developer and learned so much. I worked hard there and they thought so too. They hired me, and I spent a decent amount of time working for the company. I have since moved on from them. I have another job now and I am working on my own stuff as well. I love it though. There is always something new, something to learn, and I still get that rush once in a while when something finally works.

I spent so much time searching, but I never gave up, and I think that is the most important thing. Never give up. Even if you don't know what you would be giving up or what the future holds, don't stop chasing what you want. Keep learning, keep trying. You will figure it out eventually, and if you want to be a developer, remember your ABCs. Always be coding.

Transferring into the tech world

Taking the Leap

"That was great! We’ll be in touch by the end of the week,” said yet another casting director.  Another script, another audition, another failed attempt at booking an acting gig.  I lived the starving-artist lifestyle for pretty much all of my 20’s.  I did some cool jobs, met some cool people, even made it on TV a few times, but what I loved most about being an actor was telling people that I was an actor.  I detested the thought of a “desk job” in the “corporate world” and at the time, it all sounded the same. Data analyst, account manager, logistics, business development, or anything with the word “relations” in the title, I wanted no part of it.

Then came that fateful day on the basketball court.  When you go up for a rebound, and come down wrong on your heel wearing a pair of PF Flyers, sometimes your Achilles tendon snaps in two.  And sometimes when your Achilles tendon snaps in two while you have no health care and a full three figures in the bank account, it’s time to face reality and get a damn job.

I needed a job and I needed health insurance. I won’t bore you with the details, but within the next two weeks I had limped my way into an interview at Quicken Loans for a Client Relations Specialist (there’s that word “relations” again) and secured the job.  I couldn’t even tell you what a Client Relations Specialist was, or what I’d be doing on a day to day basis, but I didn’t care.

I quickly learned that Client Relations just meant “Customer Service”, and that I’d be taking phone calls from angry customers every single day for the foreseeable future.  But you know, something happened during that time. I learned that there’s something to be said for an honest day of hard work. There’s something to be said from implementing structure and discipline in your life, even if it’s not your favorite thing.  I dug deep and worked my ass off because I wanted to see how far I could advance in this new foreign land I found myself in 5-6 days per week. So I showed up with a smile, and took phone call after phone call. From there, I moved to the email team. If, by chance, you have ever submitted an email to [help@quickenloans.com](mailto:help@quickenloans.com), there is a very good chance that your reply came from me. I went on to shatter a company-wide production record that still stands to this day. I responded to 230 client emails in 8 hours. To put it into perspective, if you managed to crank out 100 emails in an 8 hour day, you crushed it. From there, I landed a position as a Trainer, which I loved because it gave me a chance to build on my client communication experience with public speaking.  I love public speaking.

But something was missing. I did alright for myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I got the job out of absolute necessity, not passion. Without the Achilles injury, I would have never chosen that path. So I decided to take a leap and carve my own path once and for all.  I have always had a keen interest in computer science and coding, but could never commit to a 4 year or even 2 year degree.  As a parent, I just couldn’t make it work. That was until I bumped into a friend who had just finished a coding bootcamp through Grand Circus.  “You mean you learned 3 years worth of material in just 3 months?”  Within 2 weeks, I had gotten an approved 90 day leave of absence from work, and enrolled in a full stack Javascript bootcamp where I would go on to learn so much that my brain could not even keep up at times. HTML, CSS, Javascript, Typescript, TDD, Express, Node, React, MongoDB. Words that I had never even heard of 6 months ago, I can now understand and implement.  I am being challenged more than ever, and loving every minute of it. The job hunt has officially begun, and the future is looking bright.

Is your tech acumen evolving in the same way your company is?

We’re not a ____ Company, we’re a Tech Company

It’s no secret that tech has successfully permeated every aspect of human existence – it’s in our cars, our homes, hell, even our dog collars. It’s completely ubiquitous. Because of this, most non-tech companies, regardless of product or industry, have realized that advancing their tech is mission critical to long term relevance. They have also realized it’s important that people KNOW they are advancing… Hence that catchy PR buzz-phrase “We’re not a \_\_\_\_ company, we’re a tech company.”

Being a Detroit native, the first \_\_\_\_ company that comes to mind is Rocket Mortgage. Going back to their 2016 Super Bowl commercial (Push Button, Get Mortgage), the company formerly known as Quicken has been strategically rebranding itself as a tech-first finance company. Of course, it’s not purely a rebrand - their product has evolved considerably alongside the branding. They walk the tech-walk with crispy UI interfaces, advanced CRMs, and Plaid integrations during underwriting.

But don’t get it twisted - their product is not technology. At its core, Rocket is still a mortgage origination and servicing company. What they have done is leverage technology to transform the customer experience and dramatically scale the capabilities of their very human workforce. This evolution has helped cement them atop the leaderboard as the largest mortgage originator in the country (by a healthy margin).

What Rocket and other companies seem to understand about tech evolution, many people fail to understand where they need to evolve as well. As tech continues permeating every aspect of our lives, employees should be thinking about how their own professional skill set is keeping pace. To paraphrase Ashton Kutcher (Michael Kelso turned seasoned tech investor), eventually we will reach a point where there are two kinds of employees, those that tell robots what to do and those that are told what to do by robots. Personally, I would rather be the former.

In a lot of ways, I’ve been able to break free from the traditional accountant’s mold because I have always emphasized technology at each stage of my career. Going back to my early days as a Deloitte auditor, I differentiated myself by always bringing a tech forward mindset (likely a result of being painfully bored all the time). Because I was able to utilize data analytics and basic automation in my projects, I was afforded opportunities way outside the average duties of a ‘Big 4 auditor’. I participated in national innovation labs, massive firm-wide software developments, and ultimately landed an advisory role helping to build a new finance transformation service offering.

Those experiences eventually led me to a seed stage Fin-Tech where I was tasked with building accounting and finance infrastructure as the company grew to 100+ employees and a 9-figure valuation. Over time, I got tired of the start-up grind and jumped ship for a wonderful offer with an iconic tech-company (a true tech company, not a \_\_\_\_ company). They needed a controller that could also build scalable financial systems, which was a perfect match for my skill set.

When I tell people I’m a CPA, most people just assume I do taxes and their eyes glaze over at the mere thought of learning more. If there is genuine interest, I sometimes go deeper and explain the true nature of my trade. At this point in my career, accounting is like 20% of what I do. The other 80% is business process consulting, systems engineering, software implementation, product management, data analytics, and IT troubleshooting. These non-accounting skill sets have allowed me to broaden my professional experiences and significantly enhanced my earning potential.

So, with that said, I pose this question to the non-developer professionals out there. As analysts, lawyers, project managers, etc. - how is your own digital skillset evolving? Is your tech acumen evolving alongside your employer in order to stay relevant? If this is old news and you already know how to code python, great – you are way ahead of many professionals. If this has got you thinking – here are some easy suggestions for how you can start to expand your own skill set right away.

* Familiarize yourself with latest and greatest software in your field/industry
* Learn what APIs are and how they can link software/databases together
* Understand the different record types in databases that you use regularly
* Understand how key fields are shared between record types and how these fields initiate action
* Identify ways to automate repetitive tasks performed by you and your peers
* Learn how to link data from different sources and use Power BI or PivotTables to analyze that data

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Taking the Leap

Transferring into the tech world

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We’re not a ____ Company, we’re a Tech Company

Is your tech acumen evolving in the same way your company is?

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Late Bloomer

Starting in tech a few years "late"

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