A Struggle to a New Path

How starting a new career isn’t nearly as easy as it seems

How do you start a new career? I’ve looked at a few posts on medium and through one or two google searches. I realised you shouldn’t find a solution or get motivation from an article or blog post. It’s something dictated by your, very specific, circumstances that drive you to do take a different path in your career. Or in some cases, you have absolutely no control and are forced into it. Just to make it clear: I’m not writing this post as a source of motivation for you to tell your shitty boss to fuck right off to have your “mic drop” moment as you turn around and walk out of the office. That only happens in the movies or in some imaginative world of the delusional. This is more of a therapeutic exercise for me personally and whomever has about three to four minutes to kill and read through it. Don’t expect a “Eureka” moment during, or at the end of this article. Expect honesty and anxiety with a small hint of depression through this post.

I am a well-educated collage graduate from a semi decent university stuck in a career that I didn’t always hate. At some point I even liked it and also the people that I worked with. I am a chemical engineer that worked for 5 years as a consulting, design and commissioning engineer.

I worked for the second company about three years, of which I enjoyed twelve months of, was unhappy for eighteen and dreaded six of them. There was a hire and fire atmosphere at the company that saw more people being fired than hired during the time I was there. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t any work, it was quite the opposite. When someone was fired all the work would fall to the next in lines’ desk.

This kind of atmosphere unfortunately isn’t limited to only a few companies or a certain industry. Imagine a company going through three or four senior employees in six months and all of a sudden all the work is on someone’s desk that doesn’t have the experience or skill set required to do the work. This happened to me. Luckily, I had enough confidence and savvy to see it as an opportunity to progress my career. It worked, until it didn’t. The one thing that you can’t get rid of in a company is the culture, especially if it’s a toxic culture that’s so bad that you find yourself wondering if you’ll get fired today, knowing that there is nothing wrong with your work.

That’s when I decided to pick up some new skills. Most of them were software development related. But I also picked up baking, which is awesome! At some point I’ll write a post on how baking and other mundane tasks saved and continues to do so.

I decided on python, going into data science and machine learning as I did have a bit of machine learning knowledge I picked up in collage. Data science, because it’s very analytical and following the numbers is something that I have appreciation for. But getting started in data science is boring, really boring. There is such a hype around data science that you don’t really see any articles saying that getting started is actually boring as fuck! And python really isn’t all that. Yes, it’s easy to get started with, but so is javascript. And to get to a point where you are capable of building anything noteworthy with python is much harder than with javascript. Or, at least for me, it was. So I went for javascript. To be fair, I had a lot of experience coding in VBA and visual basic, meaning I wasn’t in completely new and uncharted territory.

I enjoyed learning new technologies, it took my mind of the things that was really going on. That and drinking, drinking also helped. Not the drinking or getting drunk part, just the social atmosphere involved with going for a few drinks with your mates at the local pub. Then I got fired. Or I quit, I’m still not really sure which but it doesn’t really matter though. I didn’t have a job or a salary anymore. Luckily, I had some money saved up and support from family to last a few months if I downsized a bit. All this resulted in that the new skills I was still busy learning would have to become a source of income, and pretty soon. All I had to do is come up with an idea, easy enough right?

To be honest, coming up with an idea isn’t really the hard part, it’s having the ability to make the idea a reality that the hard part. The normal trajectory of learning a new skill is to build small projects until you have enough confidence to go for the big stuff. It goes from building a small blog or e-commerce site without authentication to building one with authentication then one with user validation, etc. There is always an order of progress or a pattern learning and maintaining a new skill. But realising that you have a finite amount of money saved up, and you have to get a product to market that can generate revenue, or at least grab the attention of a couple of investors is the hard part.

I believe the question is, where to from now? Do I still pursue the project on a full-time basis? Or do I try to find a job in a sector that’s saturated with chemical engineers? I’m not even sure if I want to go back to that. Or do I start working on a portfolio of small projects that can possibly land me a job as a junior developer? But as I said earlier, the same problems persist through all industries and all companies. Do I really want to go back to that, or do I keep my head in the game and possibly sacrifice everything to start my own company? Fortunately, I’m only 28 and if I fail and fail hard, I’ll still have enough time to get back on my feet and start doing something else.

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