An Inconvenient Realisation: Why I Made a Sideways Career Move from Developer to Business Analyst

Written by Ione Murray

Inconvenient realisations are sometimes best ignored. I realised that my favourite and most comfortable jeans have a large and immediately noticeable turmeric stain on them, and I’ve been pretending that this isn’t the case for a few months now. I don’t like the colour that I painted my office, but I’m happy to pretend that I do like the cheerful shade of aqua that I confidently picked out at the time, potentially forever, to avoid redecorating. About 2 years ago, I came to the inconvenient realisation that I’d rather be a business analyst than a developer.

I’d worked very hard to become a developer. Back in 2018, in my late twenties, I was trained up from scratch by Sky, on their Get into Tech programme; an initiative to get more women into software engineering roles. Having worked in a totally different world previously (TEFL; teaching English as a foreign language), the learning curve was huge. It was fascinating, rewarding and exhilarating but also gruelling, demoralising and emotionally exhausting to learn how to code. It would have been really convenient if I’d absolutely loved it afterwards.

It wasn’t like I hated being a developer. In fact, I enjoyed it for the most part. I worked on interesting projects with the latest technologies and had brilliant colleagues to pair programme with. However, 5 years into a software engineering career, I was becoming increasingly and uncomfortably aware that I had something missing from my personality that my engineering peers had, which I admired and envied. The engineering mind. This is perhaps definable as a mind that enjoys fixing complex technical problems. I found that I much preferred analysing the problem we were trying to fix, chatting to various colleagues about the problem and bringing together the information required to figure out the solution. I was rather uninterested in the detail of the solution itself.

Around this time, I’d become chummy with the business analyst on my team and was learning more about her role. Being a business analyst started to look really appealing. Previously, I’d understood the role to be all about being stuck in the middle of an antagonistic relationship between tech and product; a relationship fractured by the frustrations of “solutionising”, tech debt/improvement vs new feature development ratios and deadlines. But this didn’t seem to be the case at all. Product and tech got along well in my team. The product owner played Mario Kart with us on Fridays. I got to know her kids by name, who sometimes curiously wandered over to video calls on school holidays to join in refinement. The business analyst seemed to be the right hand woman of the product owner, and they made a formidable duo. I also observed that the business analyst had fun doing exciting detective work, eliciting information from lots of interesting people all over the business and drawing very cool diagrams so that we, the engineers, understood exactly what the problem that we needed to solve was.

I managed to ignore my inconvenient realisation that I was a business analyst trapped in the life of a developer until one evening when my partner and I were watching a film, and the TV stopped working. My partner is an engineer, the sort of engineer who is perfectly suited to being an engineer. He seems unfazed when things stop working. In fact, the TV breaking was great fun for him. He giddily got to work right away. “Ooh maybe it could be this… or perhaps that… let’s isolate these conditions and incrementally try x y z… perhaps while we’re fixing it, we can improve the…”. In other words, he has an engineering mind. By contrast, I hate it when the television’s broken. I can barely imagine anything worse.

That evening, my partner said that he found it curious that I had chosen to become an engineer, given my sour and sullen reaction to having to help fix the television. The next day at work, I enquired about becoming a business analyst to the leadership team within Dunelm’s business analysis chapter. The wonderful folk in the business analysis chapter took a chance on me and put me into a business analysis secondment role in a fantastic team with lovely supportive colleagues.

I am now 14 months into a business analysis career. I’ve never felt happier in a job. Though I generally enjoyed being a developer to a sufficient extent, I often felt like an imposter or a pretender, who could be outed at any minute as someone who had no idea what they were doing. But as a BA, I feel a sense of belonging, like being home. I am better suited to dealing with the sort of challenges that come my way. In fact, I even won an award at Dunelm’s BA awards for practising “Exemplary Business Analysis”. Permit me this boasting; I’ve never won anything like it in my 35 years, and could never have dreamt of winning the equivalent as a developer.

Being a BA is exciting, it’s a bit like being a detective. Digging away to find the right nugget of information. It’s also a bit like being a translator. Speaking the language of both stakeholders and engineers. I speak to many different people every day. I’ve very rarely had 2 similar days. I have a spring in my step and a sense of peace from feeling that I am where I am supposed to be.