How I Finally Got in to Tech
Published: 2019-04-09 02:56:08

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title: How I Finally Got in to Tech
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This is the story of how I finally got into tech after years of not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m not finished yet and I maybe haven’t fully decided where in tech I want to end up but after talking to a lovely lady at a Code Like a Girl event I thought I should write my story down on the off chance that I can help someone else to take the leap.
First, a little about my background. Really I should have always been in tech, I was born in 81 and whilst we didn’t have a lot growing up I was very lucky that my dad loved technology (and so did his friends) so I had a hand me down Vic20 at the age of 3 and by the time I was 6 or 7 we had also received a hand me down Commodore 64. Now the downside of not having much more than our computers was that this made the computers our most prized possession, I was well aware that very few other people could afford these machines so whilst I played on them everyday I never really tinkered out of fear of breaking the thing I loved knowing full well we could not afford to replace it. I know my husband got a lot of his joy and knowledge by pulling things apart to see how they worked and I’m not sure they all went back together again.  Another downside of early adoption is that computing classes in school, if they existed at all, were extremely basic. I'm talking instruction on turning on the computer,loading a word processing program and then printing. My college (Yr 11) had one advanced computing class which I applied to but the school (being the late 90’s) decided I was clearly confused and instead placed me in the computing course which amounted to a year of learning excel and powerpoint (and refused to let me switch).However, I was still a good student and playing on computers for an hour a day was still better than other courses so I did the work and completed the assignments. Unfortunately, our teacher was not great with computers, she was always there more as a supervisor so when she somehow lost all of the classes assignments at the end of the year I don’t think anyone was super surprised. What was surprising was the plan to just give us all a passing grade (again most of the kids at this time did not have computers at home so they had mostly done the assignment on the school computers). After graduating year 12 I got my first part time job and started to think about what I wanted to do for a living. At the time IT was all over the news as the career to get in to, the money was great and now that we had survived the Y2K bug computers were clearly the future. I still loved computers so this was right up my alley and I applied to CIT (kind of a tech school rather than university) to do my diploma of IT. However, when I went to the info night to talk to the teachers about the course and hand in my application I was informed I could not get in as it was very popular so they would only take applicants with a high aptitude for computers which I clearly did not have because I only just passed my excel class. I tried to explain that I had had computers since I was a small child to no avail. Now maybe I could have fought harder and maybe I could have kept applying (there wasn’t any other similar courses at this time and I wasn’t old enough to go to uni as a mature age student) but I’m sure if you speak to most girls (and probably any guys who also didn’t get in) that after all of this discouragement you just think maybe you should give up. 
From there I went with the super common route of getting a job in retail, moving from part time to full time and eventually from retail to office work deciding I was just destined to have a job rather than a career. Many years later, whilst working in an office job at a terrible company, I realized I didn't want to keep working in an office and I wanted out.
Also around this time I ended up needing surgery and having quite a bit of time off on bed rest. This seemed to coincide with a lot of the beginnings of the teaching girls to code movement which got me reminiscing about my love of all things computers. My husband also was watching lots of Programming Conference videos whilst working from home / caring from me and this got me hooked. Took a little while before I mentioned I wanted to give learning to program a try (no idea why I thought he would think I was crazy) but I was reading more and more about programming and the lack of women in tech (an interview in Vogue magazine with Tracy Chou about her git repository of the actual numbers of women at big companies was a major decider) gave me the courage to say to my husband that I wanted to try and learn it. Of course my husband was super supportive and we ordered some text books and with his tutoring I started learning C++ (because why not start life on hard mode) and from there I just got more and more in love with all things tech and programming. I also started doing my Bachelor of IT at an online uni but I still didn’t have a huge amount of marketable IT skills (and certainly I was not going to be hired to program just yet) so I polished up my resume putting particular focus on every time I had utilised my IT and problem solving skills (often both at the same time) and I applied for every single entry level IT job I could. 
Most of those jobs in my area are Level 1 helpdesk for government departments and I applied to every company that offered that service or recruited for companies that did. I had a few interviews and eventually I got hired at the company I now work for. I started on the help desk and this I have just started on the Level 3 apps management team. I am not done yet and I still am not a programmer but I am closer and I really love the company I work for. I may not get to program at this company exactly and I may decide that I am happy doing a little powershell and just programming as a hobby at home but I enjoy working with tech and working with like minded people and no one can take away the knowledge I now have and they cant take away my renewed love for learning new skills and languages. 
By the way I didn’t start learning programming until I was in my 30’s and I was 35 when I got my job in tech.Just remember it is never too late as long as you keep trying and it doesn’t matter where you are coming from or what your background is, give it a try, you may love it and decide its what you want to be paid to do, you may just do it as a hobby or you may hate every second of it and never want to look at a line of code again. All of those scenarios are valid, just don’t let anyone else stop you or discourage you if you want to give it a try.