Side Adventures Before Wanting To Become Software Engineer
Side Adventure 1: First Job Tutorial
Reward : 50k
A few years later, during my final year of college I started my shadowing process. For those of you who are not familiar, you basically hover over the doctor and watch them do doctorly things for a few hours, ask questions, and have some hands on experience with some procedures if they allow it. It is a requirement to help you discover if this was the right fit in terms of a career path for you.
After countless hours of shadowing, I started to doubt my choice, but by this time, it was also really late in the game to change my degree since I was going to graduate in a few months. In a moment of panic, and unsure what to do with my Neurobiology degree I decided to at least find a job in the healthcare field to buy myself time, but also because I needed a job ASAP to start paying off my student loans.
Luckily for me, there was a new initiative that was being pushed through by the government that mandated doctors to make a switch from paper records to Electronic Medical Records (EMR/EHR). This gave birth to an industry called Health IT which was a workforce that would help with the implementation, compliance, maintenance, consulting, and everything around supporting this initiative. My school saw this opportunity and created a 3 month bootcamp to train us up on the industry and help us get that J-O-B through their network. Their selling point? 50k+ salary for new grads. Sign me up!
I got my first job working as a software trainer, which was a perfect fit for someone who used to do tutoring as a side gig and dabbled in various types of software as natural nerd. Our job was to absorb and learn everything about the EMR/EHR software and then get shipped out to teach doctors, nurses, and their supporting staff on how to use the system across the nation. It was a pretty sweet gig considering I got to travel the US, saw some really cool places (and not so cool places).
Ultimately, I had a love hate situation for my job. I loved tinkering with the software, teaching, and coming up with creative solutions with the product, but in the back of my mind I wish I could have improved the product to make it better for the user. (If only I was a software developer…I thought to myself). I ended up disliking health care industry because of what I saw on the field. Also, really because our health care system just really sucks for patients and providers alike to be honest.
Side Adventure 2: Job Change Tutorial
Reward: 100K
At some point I decided to quit my job deciding to focus my career in tech and leave health care. I ended up at a new company, still as a software trainer, with an amazing product to work with. Essentially every process that I taught, how to prescribe medications, document a chart, and etc that had to repeated over and over again, I could create with my company’s product. The product would put an overlay on any software application with guidance balloons, tips, and a help menu so the user could be self-sufficient.
As I learned more about our product, it actually had a bit more technical components such as the need for jQuery and CSS to optimize it’s performance and design. Being required to learn these topics, in order to enable our customers, reminded me how fun it was to write code back in high school. I took several “Intro to…”, coding-esque courses online and found them very enjoyable and nostalgic.
After a few months of working, I found that there was quite a funny paradox in which we weren’t able to use our own product to teach our product. We had something partially built out, but every time we tried to get a resource aka software developer to help develop this out a bit more we got the “ain’t nobody got time for that” for our team’s initiatives, so we ended buying other software tools to teach our product.
If there’s anything that I have learned in my time here, it is that teaching or making it intuitive to use your product is key to the success of the business. I love what I do and want my company to be successful. I think that creating teaching within context and at the right time is extremely valuable and wanted to push forward that initiative of that partially built product. So I thought to myself, “Well if we can’t get a resource to build this out, why don’t I start learning how to develop? After all, I realize I still love technology and I did learn Java once a upon a time in high school.” Like MMORPG players say, it was time for a class change to something more OP…
