An Untraditional Path to Software Engineer
I’ve been building software for 15 years and I’m currently a Senior Software Engineer at Accenture where I’ve been for a little over 3 years. Every so often, I get asked by people younger than me, junior developers/engineers, and others interested in wanting to grow in the software engineering space what my experience has been or how I got to where I am. What I wish I could tell them is that I graduated high school and went straight to a state university where I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree and then interned at a software engineering company as an apprentice software developer before I worked my way up to senior software engineer. A lot of software engineers go that route and that is probably the best streamlined approach. However, that isn’t the route I took. Instead, I dropped out of high school in my senior year, acquired my GED, bounced through 3 different colleges trying to figure what I wanted to do, and broke into the IT industry in a help desk center while still finishing my first Associate’s degree. I eventually acquired a Master’s degree 2 more colleges later and have worked at different companies in various roles for 18 years now.
For most of that time, I’ve been embarrassed by this route that I took because I feel like I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I’ve always avoided mentioning where I went to college because I always thought of it as a degree-mill college that nobody would likely recognize. It always seemed like all my colleagues would proudly mention a state university or similar. This always made me feel like an impostor or like I didn’t belong. It also made me question if there were a bunch of things I didn’t learn that I should know because I didn’t complete degrees at state universities like everyone else. I attended University of Arkansas and Arkansas State University for one semester each. I finished an Associate’s degree at Remington College. I attended University of Phoenix for about a year. I ended my collegiate pursuit of higher learning at American Intercontinental University where I completed an Associate’s degree, a Bachelor’s degree, and a Master’s degree.
When I first broke into the IT industry, I started in a help desk at the very bottom of the IT ladder. I never planned to be a software developer. I instead wanted to be a network administrator. After a couple different jobs in the help desk role and related, I eventually landed a role with a small company in a very rural town as the network administrator/help desk/computer guru. They didn’t have anyone at the company that knew much about computers, networking, server management, etc. so I became that guy. I got really good at my job; so good that I had free time where I took an interest in trying to improve their website that hadn’t been touched in 7 years because nobody knew how to do it and it was created with Frontpage. I had no experience with this and knew next to nothing about website development. I also had nobody to teach me or help me when I got stuck. But what I did have was ambition, drive, and a willingness to learn something new. That was all I needed to create a whole new website for the company. After that, I realized how much I enjoyed the software development side of things and that was enough for me to begin my career as a software engineer.
My experience in my career was not the optimal path but at this point in my career, I’m happy with where I’m at and what I’ve managed to achieve so far. The reason I wrote this entry is because I know that there are other people out there that question if they are on the right path or feel like imposters in the software industry because they don’t feel like they have right schooling or background. I just want to say that there is no right path and a little ambition and drive can go a long way.
