Folks who moved into tech - what should people know about the transition?

Go on Reddit and search your question with a similar logic - you’d find waaaay more answers. Some things I can think of right now as someone who’s also interested in learning this:

• SWE isn’t easy and isn’t for everyone, the type of thinking is a bit different than finance and is very black and white, either it works or doesn’t - no bullshitting

• wlb depends a lot on your team, shit team/ shit manager means you’re going to have a really tough time learning and you’ll have to make up for it with lots of learning on your own

• depending on where you work, often you’ll likely be “on call” between sprints of projects for many companies and that can mean really chill or really fucked up because your company wants to provide quality service but if suddenly clients have questions or bugs then you need to fix those asap and it could be in the middle of the night at some places

• you’ll constantly need to learn new frameworks and refresh your skills, which will take time to do and new grads will already have those skills equipped because they’ve been grinding this stuff in uni/ college and through their internships and projects

• if you’ve never done coding, debugging will make you pull out your hair because it’s actually very difficult when you don’t have enough experience initially

• if you need to release a feature and have a deadline, then it will be a stressful 2 weeks-1 month sprint and if you get put on another hard project then you could be working a lot for months on end

• git/ version control and working with other teams off-site can mean time zone issues, communication issues, introducing new bugs to the codebase and that becomes a clusterfuck for everyone if your team lead doesn’t have things under control and code reviews filter out these problems

• unless you work for some of the chiller/ larger companies/ companies with better culture, many places won’t pay you good comp as a junior dev, don’t expect 6 digits unless at high COL cities and even then COL will make it hard to save (see below)

• super high pay often means working at higher COL cities so after higher taxes and higher basic living needs like rent and food (inflation) you’re still left with a good amount but you gotta be careful with lifestyle creep because it can come fast

• highly recommend not making a move right now if you’re thinking, junior market is not great because everyone is stuck there trying to find a junior role, whereas most companies want senior devs instead

• the thing that worries me the most is - it’s very hard to master both SWE and be good at finance, both take a lot of time and I think the only way to be good at both is to do jobs in both, but that means trade-offs in time invested in each skill and also worse career progression in either… I’m still trying to figure this one out myself too, I have some answers but they all mean I’m gonna have to work a lot regardless lol

Hope this helps.