It’s crazy to think about my Flatiron journey coming to a close. It feels like I just started and also like I’ve been working on it forever. These past 10 months have been a lot of hard work. I wasn’t sure how it would go since leaving college, getting out of the study groove, and working full time. There’s many emotions coming to the surface; excited, proud, anxious, scared, happy, nervous. How did I get here? Where am I going? What am I looking for? These are all questions that have been circling my thoughts.
Getting There
After finishing college, I did not know what I wanted to do specifically for a job, but wanted to go into IT. The IGNITE rotational program at Harley was a perfect fit because I was getting exposure to different teams in an expedited format. I basically started over 3 times before landing a permanent role I could settle into. Restarting new roles so frequently taught me how to get myself organized and to digest a lot of information in a short time. The best analogy for it is drinking from a firehose. I was learning a lot and not all of it was of interest, but there were online resources available to dive deeper into what did interest me. I found myself always looking for coding content and, although I had those resources, I still felt like I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture of how everything works together. This is when I started looking for something more structured and came across Flatiron.
In 2018, I put ‘learn to code’ as a New Years resolution and started the bootcamp prep work. There was a challenge going on and people with a learning streak of 10 days or more would be entered into a drawing for prizes. Unfortunately I did not win a prize, but I did get the bug to keep my streak going and completed the prep work. It wasn’t until June 2020 I submitted my application to enroll in the Software Engineering program and was accepted. I had just moved to St. Louis in March 2020 and with the pandemic I wasn’t getting out much, so I felt strongly now was the time to jump.
Into the Thick of It
I chose the start date of September 8 knowing my boyfriend and I planned a trip to drive out to Montana September 18. This made for an interesting time to get started studying. From St. Louis the drive was 25 hours to Lakeside, Montana with 2 stops in Deadwood, South Dakota and Bozeman, Montana on the way there and a stop in Cheyenne, Wyoming on the way back. Drew was nice to take a majority of the driving duties, but the flexibility of coding is something I love about it. It can be done by anyone anywhere. I had some lessons pre-loaded for when we were really out in the thick of it where my hotspot wouldn’t reach.
Working full-time during the program was a major challenge. I don’t think it would have been possible if I was still going into the office and not working remotely. I found I was most productive in the evenings and would start working between 8:00-9:00pm on weekdays and would also work on the weekends. For the weekdays, I would try to cut myself off by 2:00am because by 3:00am I was not going to have a good morning. A lot depended on if I had meetings scheduled for the morning or not. I was on a project team implementing an enterprise version of GitHub and for a while I had 8:00am meetings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was glad when those ended. On days that I didn’t have meetings in the morning, I would get up around 9:30-10:00am. Many of those mornings I would feel like a shlub for getting up at that hour when others had been working since 7:00am, but would remind myself I am still working hard, just on a different schedule.
For the first couple months I did not tell my manager that I was working on the program. At the beginning of 2020, I attempted to apply for the Harley tuition reimbursement program, which I had to get his approval for, but that fell through and I never revisited it to tell him I was actually doing it. Eventually we were talking about submitting a request for me to get a title promotion and that was when I told him I was about half way through the program. I felt like it was pertinent to the request to show that I am not only investing in myself financially, but also putting in the work on my own to get new technical skills.
A Fork in the Road
It’s been 5 years since starting at Harley. I’ve enjoyed my time there and have learned a lot. It’s been an interesting 5 years at the company as I’ve made it through at least 3 rounds of reorganizations and lay-offs. Along with the re-orgs, it’s just been a period of cutting back in general. The free coffee machines were replaced with self-supplied k-cups, the tuition reimbursement and training budget was cut down, our annual merit increases were cut, and it seems like every year there was a goal to find savings of $5-10 million. My manager has since left, along with many others recently, and leadership positions have been filled with external people, which can be discouraging.
In some ways, I feel like I’m in a similar spot to where I started. I have these new skills and I don’t know specifically what I’m looking, but I want it to be technical. For many years, Harley has outsourced a majority of the technical operational work to Infosys, but with recent changes in leadership and cost cutting, it’s looking like some of that work will be brought in house. The new aim is to be more agile. With that changes need to be made quicker and if we have to outsource that work there is less control over timing and know-how. So do I stay at Harley and try to move to a more technical role, or do I look elsewhere? Right now I feel like the answer is both. I’m not I a hurry to make a change right away, but I want to see what opportunities are out there. Looking would also create leverage at Harley. With all of the recent departures, there is more work and less tribal knowledge around. The IGNITE program has also been cut so there is no longer a pipeline of young people out of college coming in. I’m anxious to get started with my career coach to bounce all of these thoughts and factors off of.
Up from Here
Since Montana, all trips have been planned around after finishing Flatiron. In 3 weeks we are taking a family trip to Alaska and it’ll will be my first trip in a while that is totally a vacation. Needless to say, I can’t wait. I will be meeting with my career coach after Alaska. I am so proud of the work that I have completed through this program.
- Ruby CLI - Spanish Speaking Countries: study facts of countries that speak Spanish and quiz yourself on the country’s capitals
- Sinatra - Garden Harvest: track crops grown in your garden
- Rails - Moody Foodie: log into your account to track what your ate that day, your mood at the end of the day, and see what others are eating
- JavaScript - Murcar Cellar: track your inventory of wines and make comments on them
- React Redux - Krafty Krab: track your craft ideas, works in progress, inventory, and items sold
I feel confident in the base knowledge I’ve gained as a stepping stone to learning additional languages and frameworks. I drank from the Flatiron Software Engineering program firehose and, as the title of this blog suggests, this is just the beginning of my technical journey. Look out internet, there’s a new developer on the scene.