I wrote a book on how to leave wall street for silicon valley without learning to code. I would appreciate any feedback

Hi, A couple of years ago I left my M&A job to try and see if the grass was greener in Silicon Valley. Like many people on this forum, I loved the markets and loved doing deals, but was tired of the grind of finance, and especially did not care for what I was seeing looking down the road in the industry in terms of regulatory actions , hiring decreases , and compensation reduction. It was scary to leave banking, as it had been all I knew for a long time, but I was ultimately satisfied with both my decision to leave and the time that I did spend in finance at the beginning of my career. There are things that I miss about finance, but I am also much happier in the tech world. That might just be me though. Anyways, you hear a lot about talent flowing from wall street to silicon valley, or people thinking about moving to california, but one thing that I kept hearing from friends and others was how it was difficult to go about finding a good tech job if you either did not know how to code or had no desire to code. It seems that tech companies only want to hire engineers. The truth is that this is not the case, and that there are many exciting opportunities for those that cannot code, they are just hard to find sometimes. For this reason, I wrote a book on my experience quitting my job and transitioning to a tech company as someone who has zero coding talent. I have laid out everything that I did step by step, and I hope that it can be helpful to others that have the same pang to venture into the world of tech. Please check out my book's website http://financeto.tech and let me know if you have any feedback. I would love to hear from anyone considering a similar move!

2 Comments
 

I wonder, tech seems to be such a hot market right now and as someone who works in the life sciences (lab tech, soul crushing work with low pay, bartend to make near 50k in a small city) and wants to break in, I want to know more about the industry myself. It seems like right now the demand is high and you have ways to break in without needing a CS degree, my question is, is it always going to be this accepting of an industry with somewhat lower barriers to entry or do you see it becoming like banking to where most employers will ONLY take college grads from certain universities with a certain GPA?

 

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