Transitioning from marketing to tech

In August 2020 I changed my career from marketing to engineering. Now 3 years later, I would like to take some time for reflection. How was the transition? What went well? Where did I struggle?? Retro-style.?

What went well

Overall, my transition went rather smoothly.

• I moved internally so I already knew the organisation, its culture, processes, and I knew some friendly faces.?
• Moving internally, I learned 90% on the job and 10% from online classes like introduction classes to Python and SQL. It did not cost me a cent. Also I neither had to quit my job nor had to apply for a new one. I always had an income.
• My organisation paired me with a Python developer to guide me in my learning.

Where I struggled

• At first my choice of hardware and developer tools were not optimal. For example, I started coding on a windows machine ... and until recently I would still manually commit to GitHub using the command line and have since learned there are more convenient ways to do it using any IDE’s GitHub plugin.?
• It took me a while to adjust to the scrum framework. In marketing I could organise my work to my individual preferences and now I had to contend with sprint planning and ticket requirements. Daily reporting on my work progresses was overwhelming at the beginning but now I think the daily stand can be the most efficient meeting of the day.
• I could run my code daily on my computer but sometimes my weekend bike trips would take me far away from my laptop and finding a way to run it from a remote machine got rapidly problematic. I got lost in setting-up virtual machines,? scheduler, and the deployment process so finally I asked for help (best decision ever) and a fellow engineer helped me set it up. It took me a while to understand what he did and eventually be able to change it or set it up myself.?

Tips if you were to transition

• Your motivation will determine the success of your transition. For me, I found it motivating to apply my new knowledge directly by developing a tool that I would eventually use.?
• Focus at the beginning on the code development itself, not on infrastructure related tasks. You will learn this, but in a second step.
• Most people are ready to help! You know what : many people are happy to share knowledge and help. Ask for help! Also I was surprised to see that many engineers are eager to understand the business background. Pair with them!

Looking back, I'm really happy I made that decision. I find it very rewarding. In some ways I haven’t stopped being a marketer really. In fact, I have now joined a marketing team as an engineer. We build tools for them to manage their google ads. It feels right to work in this function, and that’s a nice feeling.

Lastly I would like to thank the people who supported me in this change : Dimitrios Tritaris and Marc Schumacher from the management as well as Philipp, Amr Ehab and Kylasam N A , my tech heroes.