Landing my first engineering job in 2020

It’s been a year now since I graduated from a coding bootcamp and completed a software engineering fellowship.

Two months after graduating, I landed my first engineering job and prepared to move from New York City to Silicon Valley. I was ecstatic, and finally achieved the goals I set forth a year earlier.

Lo and behold, in that same week, a global pandemic was declared on my birthday, and the offer was rescinded due to covid.

While a rollercoaster ride indeed, in the grand scheme of things, these events paled in comparison to the escalating health crisis and social unrest that ensued. Rather than scrabbling to push out job applications, I focused the next few months on doing a few practice problems per day, staying informed on proper covid safety measures, and learning about police reform.

As new covid cases began leveling out in July, I hopped back into the search and was fortunate enough to land a software engineering internship at VTS.

The Internship

Upon hearing of my offer acceptance, one of my interviewers and soon-to-be teammates reached out to welcome me through a video call. We shared our excitement of soon working together, and acknowledged the oddity of this new way of work. Without the environmental cues of entering a new office and seeing new faces, I was slow to process that this was really happening…in my living room.

Some swirling thoughts that preoccupied my brain included:

• The abandonment of my previous professional ambitions in international health and research.
• That one time I visited WHO, all wide-eyed, thinking, how fun it would be to work and live in Switzerland next?
• The irony of making a career switch from public health to software engineering during a time like this.
• That other time I told myself: no more school after I get this MSc in Public Health. I want to work. And make money.
• Then quitting my job to attend school-on-steroids, also known as, a coding bootcamp.
• All those hours of studying to achieve this very moment.

There was a lag time for sure, but when reality eventually hit, I felt overwhelmingly grateful.

Initially, I didn’t expect a lot of collaboration due to the nature of working from home. However, tools such as Zoom, Google Calendar, and Slack made for a streamlined remote onboarding experience. Most impressive of all, was the use of Tuple for pair programming. Tuple’s neat features allowed me to participate in remote pairing multiple times a week, and I came away each session learning a ton.

As a career switcher and first time software engineer, my team consistently checked in to:

1. Ask if I need help.
2. Remind me to reach out for help if needed.

Seemingly menial on the surface, the reminder from time to time particularly reinforced everyone’s willingness to extend a helping hand. My manager also emphasized the importance of psychological safety, which means a lot to anyone new to the expansive field of software engineering.

All of this instilled a level of comfort for me to be my most productive self, and to proactively reach out whenever I found myself stuck on any one problem for too long.

Unlike internships that batch interns into cohorts for isolated projects, I was integrated to work on the living core app used by tens of thousands of people. As a member of the front end team, my first task required an app wide font change during the second week of my internship. Font changes rarely occur, and my team provided me the opportunity to release this large scale visual change early on.

VTS gave me the opportunity to create real value from day one and this made every pull request all the more exciting.

Transitioning to Full-Time

After 14 weeks of interning, I was thrilled to become an official software engineer at VTS :’)

Apart from a wave of congratulatory welcomes on my new status, I continued on similar tracks of work. From the beginning, I was entrusted to work on tasks comparable to the ones any other engineer on the front end team would tackle. Mentorship and guidance were readily available, but I also had the freedom to work independently.

Despite no huge overhaul of duties, I still felt a personal shift in my sense of responsibilities after transitioning from an intern to a full-time position. The removal of “intern” from my title empowered me to take greater ownership as well as weigh in more, whereas previously, I remained in sponge mode to listen and to absorb.

In this remote work world, communication is key. Nobody knows you’re stuck unless you tell them. Nobody knows you want or need help, unless you tell them. Starting out as an intern put me in the right mindset to be more forthcoming about the things I know, the things I’m working on, and the things I frankly never heard of. Without the awareness to truthfully pinpoint these areas, this is where imposter syndrome comes from.

Fortunately, the supportive environment here at VTS encourages open expression of these three areas as opportunities to teach, grow, and learn together.

Reflection

It’s been one heck of a year for EARTH, and all of us deserve to feel this proud Ross moment in their bones:

This year didn’t turn out the way any of us expected, but staying close to family and friends after living abroad for so many years is exactly where I need to be right now. Those years of travel taught me a lot about sitting with uncertainty and having to adapt. We are more resilient than we think and 2020 has been a testament to that.

While all of us at VTS will still be working from home for the first half of 2021 (and perhaps beyond), we’ll continue to put one foot in front of the other. In tough times like these, where many internships have been cancelled, VTS continues to see the value of bringing in diverse talent. Unforeseen challenges of 2020 were met with transparency and understanding, and this exemplifies great leadership.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to meet my colleagues in-person in the near future!