My journey from operations manager to backend developer

To start with, I never liked computer science in my school. Never
!! To make matters worse, I ended up taking Engineering in
Computer Science. As I was not interested in my college subjects, I always looked for alternate options like running my startup or taking up a part-time sales job. Sometimes, I even thought of quitting college.

After my four years at college ended, I started my official career with HackerRank as Operations Manager. I was primarily involved in conducting recruitment tests events for various clients where aspirants solved coding problems. My job was to run these events or to help companies achieve them. I must ensure that this event goes smoothly and not even a single candidate faces any external difficulty between the tests.

Life was excellent, and I was enjoying my work. However, soon I realized my shortcomings of not solving or comprehending the fundamental doubts of coding questions. Whenever candidates used to ask for a simple explanation of the coding questions, I had to run to the development team to help the candidates. All these tests were time-bound, and my continuous to and fro
movements wasted a good amount of the candidates’ time.

After work, I started learning basic data structures and algorithms to fill this gap. I took help and guidance from my peers and started practicing coding by picking a programming language like Java. I began with fundamental questions from arrays, strings, and linked lists. I solved many questions from HackerRank, which were related to the data structure, algorithms, and Java.

Soon my interest spiked exponentially, and I felt more inclination towards development. I started solving more and more questions from all the possible learning sources. I moved my fence beyond basic strings and lists to trees and graphs. Although I had come from a Computer engineering background, my lack of fundamental knowledge led to times when I could not understand the basics and wanted to give up immensely. There were times when my frustration had reached sky limits, but somewhere at the back of my mind, I always knew that perseverance was the key. I used to get stuck in loops multiple times wherein the beginning, I would not know how to tackle the problem, but then somehow, after spending some time and effort, I would get the fix, and suddenly the problems would get solved. Even today, I get stuck in the same loop when I pick up a new task, but I enjoy my brainstorming challenges now.

Going back, I had simultaneously enrolled in the Udacity Front End Nanodegree course. Here I had to make small projects on HTML, CSS, and basic JS. My tech team supported me, and I got a few chances to push small and minor changes into production. I was enjoying this small step, and hence, I immediately enrolled in Udacity Full Stack Nanodegree and FreeCodeCamp courses. Here I worked on small projects that helped me understand backend development basics. FreeCodeCamp platform and community both helped me a lot in learning. To mention, all this extra effort in the development field was going parallel with my regular Operations work. After these courses were over, I created a GitHub profile and started building some small end-to-end projects. These projects helped me in understanding the complete flow of the language. I picked up NodeJS from the many languages since I had to work on only one language to write both front-end and backend.

The final time arrived to decide whether I wanted to continue with my career in Operations, which I had always liked, or should I take the risk to start afresh. One side had more than two years of experience; On the other side, I had to start afresh. It’s not easy to find anyone in India who has moved from sales to tech background, and hence I wasn’t sure which one to choose. Honestly, I was confused. Some advised me to stay with my current stable and comfortable life, while others directed me to pursue my new dream. Like Robert Frost, I chose the road less taken.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost

Now I am a full-time developer, and I am delighted to take that decision.