How this chemical engineer taught himself code and started working as a web developer

Watch the full interview here :

In this post of Stories of Hackers, we talked with Sean, a chemical engineer who taught himself how to code and eventually started working as a web developer! We hope that you guys can gain some new insights through his experience, enjoy! 

As a self-taught web developer, can you share your background and your story to our community, Sean?

Thanks for having me! Just a little bit about me, I am actually a chemical engineering graduate. I entered the workforce in 2019 and worked as a process engineer which is basically a design oriented process engineer for a consulting company, basically we are like subcontractors to companies like Petronas, Exxon you know and I was doing that for about a year.

What made you want to make the switch from an engineering field to web development?

I was actually liking what i was doing, it's just that you know the timing and everything was had so much to play. Basically in early 2020 March as we know Malaysia went into a lockdown right? But even slightly before that due to the nature of the consulting jobs so it's project-based so our workload very heavily dependent on sort of the nature of the project and which phase of the project is right? So when there's heavy workload everyone's really busy but when there's a low workload everyone's free.

In about February 2020 I think we had quite a low workload season for like a couple of weeks before the next phase of the project and we had a little bit of downtime in a sense that we would be at work but there wasn't much work to be done and i was just like you know i'm quite free at work now so let's just take this opportunity or at least this couple of weeks and let's just learn up something new like upskill and i've always thought that learning programming would be cool and kinda started doing when i was working a lot with like excel sheets and stuff and i just sort of dwindled a little bit into like excel vbas right that's why I always thought programming would be cool to automate stuff so i just told myself  I'm gonna learn a little bit of programming during this down time and that sort of was the case.  I watched a few crash courses and  actually started off with python because of the automation right you think like python anything like that. 

So that was kind of how it started even before the lockdown happened, i sort of already kind of committed for long-term learning after dwindling my toes a little bit into this tech world and found it's really interesting. When the lockdown happened, we were all working from home and I used to commute two hours a day so now I got an extra two hours to use ,since I was already learning something right? Why not put that time to better use and that's where I sort of continued learning even more and kind of how it slowly just transitioned and how it started for me.

Why would you, from a very nice consulting job, want to jump to programming? What's the interesting thing about programming that really got you and saying that okay this can be my career too?

Yeah, a lots of factors, one being I was in consulting, it's a good environment and all but at the same time since i was in the oil and gas field, it got hit really hard by the covid. I've actually noticed some of my colleagues being retrenched during this time. Fortunately for me i got to secure my job because the project got extended and i was part of that project team that basically got extended. This is when i realised it's quite a cyclical nature, up and down sector and it's quite normal to sometimes lose your job because there's no projects or you know the demand for oil is low and there aren't projects coming in right so that's one factor. The other factor, I think is the whole fact that tech just really interests me, I started from python and then soon realized okay i can't really do much like front-end stuff with python as fast as i would like to and i think that's when i actually started discovering more about like javascript and that whole ecosystem and how i can build really cool stuff with just like all this front-end languages and just scripting.

And I think that enticed me more and really attracted me a lot more as well and the whole nature. So everyone's at lockdown,  we're all remote working and that whole nature of most industries were actually struggling to work from home or struggling to work remotely but the tech industry and a developer's role thrives sort of in isolation in remote working i mean you still lose on the communication but the whole nature of that tech role you actually can thrive in this nature. You can work remotely for example for a company in Singapore and you are living in Malaysia. That's really cool to me.

From what I heard from your story it took you just around six months to learn coding before you landed your first full-time job. Tell us what was the journey like I mean that must have been?

I was having a full-time job but I think ultimately I was really into it and had my eyes set on a goal. I actually gave myself to the end of 2020 to actually transition into a new role. I started about in February and in about April or May i told myself I'm just gonna really try hard on this and try to transition into tech. I gave myself that goal and it was just a grind daily. I would spend any time i had like right before work or after work weekends just learning,  trying to build stuff, trying to come up with a portfolio because obviously if you look at my CV back then i had no relevant skills, i had quite zero transferable skills besides like soft skills, all the hard skills were not transferable they were very chemical engineering oriented so i had to sort of build something for myself to showcase that okay at least i can do stuff i can build stuff or at least have something to show for and have a conversation starter. Ultimately is because i had the interest and i had sort of a liking for it as well and that just kept me going every day. 

A lot of my early learning days was just learning by consuming so I was consuming a lot of information, less of the time was actually building because I was still quite new so I had to consume a lot before I could actually sort of tangibly try to build stuff.

If you had to say what are the secret techniques that you use or what would be your in those six months for everyone who wants to start self-learning?

I'll probably say from my perspective because i think everybody in their own season and it really depends where you're coming from because the time frame and your availability will look very different in other circumstances but from my own perspective I think I had that goal in mind so I told myself at the end of 2020 to achieve my goal. I tried to find a community at a time which is actually how i reach out to The Hacker Collective because i think i just felt that i'm just doing this alone like and i really wanted to speak to people about it but all my friends around me were like either accounting grads or like other mechanical engineers. I had very little to none contacts of friends that I could sort of share this interest and share this passion with.

I sort of set a todo's, because I was most of the time going through like udemy courses, online courses or youtube courses. I would sort of prepare myself the night before and I'll just try to list down. Whether or not i actually complete that's regardless of the case but i think just at least doing that daily sort of helped me stay on track and to be really disciplined so that's i think number one.

The second one will be you gotta like what you're learning right? To be honest i was really liking what i was learning because at the same time i could see what you could potentially build at the end of it or at least up to a certain point where you've been equipped you can build all this cool stuff and that really motivated me, whether it's like super complex tutorials or like online projects that people build, so i think that's probably one of the other reasons.

Can you tell us what the company was really looking for because you weren't a Computer Science graduate, what was the company's mindset and perspective towards self-taught learners like yourself ?

I actually applied for probably over 20 positions in total and again not many got back to me  because maybe the requirements were like they weren't looking for a junior or maybe i'm not from that background so most didn't come back to me or some they would have an upfront assignment before and you have to submit that assignment along with your cv. I would try to do that assignment and send in my CV hoping that they'll get back to me but I just don't get some of the replies. From my perspective, i think some of the startups they would be okay with hiring with people regardless of their backgrounds but some of the recruiters did say that the company is quite tight on the budget so they would only pay X amount for max.

I can say for some SMEs and most startups they actually don't really care whether or not you come from a conventional IT or computer science background because at the end of the day, they are going to be assessing you whether or not that's in-person online technical  assessment or whether that's through your portfolio or one-to-one whiteboarding.

For bigger companies like those MNCs, they get like hundreds of applicants a day, and if the person doesn't have transferables skills, relevant experience or relevant skills right? They're just gonna put it aside because they have like another 100 applicants to view. I will still try to apply for the big companies anyways but i didn't really hear back from big companies and i can't blame them again right? They get tons and tons of applications per day. These were from my own experience, smaller companies that were the ones that have the time to go through it and actually call you up and have a conversation and learn more about you.  

What would you say are your future plans in terms of the software world for the next three to five years?

If you were to ask me what's the plan in the next few years, I think architecture and product architecture in terms of the tech side quite interests me because again you really think about how can I scale this up right? I think architecture is always about scalability so it's about cost, you want to lower the cost but you don't want to sacrifice scalability and I think thoughts like that, very high level thoughts of the technical side,not so much on the product side, at the moment really interests me quite a bit.

So you see yourself becoming a software architect i'm guessing?

I wouldn't say architect but someone at least in a position that can say I want to use these tools ,I want to use these products or I think we should in any case because XYZ right? And to actually start that conversation and i think my position right now and in my department has the flexibility to do that and it's actually given us some opportunities to sort of explore what we can use and what we can explore because we're not too tight down, as long as we can prove why we want to use certain things to the management, most likely that we can get a green light.

How do you see the role of community? Is there a gap in Malaysia for community and what could the community do for not just coders but people who are in other fields maybe accountants lawyers but also want to be inspired by coding right? How do you see how communities could play a role in it?

Good question, again I think I mentioned I consume a lot of content right? A lot of information and this includes podcasts or interviews by more pro and renowned tech people like for example people who work heavily in the React, people who contribute openly. 

Today Twitter is like a dying platform to many but for some reason all the tech people are there and they always share all their latest thoughts especially all the new technologies there . I've stopped using Twitter for like a good four or five years i think but i recently downloaded it again just so that i could see what's the landscape on this tech landscape on twitter because it's really interesting and i think it is like zero barriers so people just start sharing it there. 

If you ask what's the importance of community and i think this is important because you're learning from others, you're learning from either the mistakes that others have made or you're able to just bounce off ideas like you don't know how to solve something, you just ask the online community right? I think that's sort of the key of it because who else are you going to ask right? If there isn't a physical person here you can ask, there's always an online community that you can ask.

Do you have anything you want to share with people, about just any message that they should know or is useful for them from your self-learning experience?

Never stop learning and I think everyone in the tech scene because of how fast the tech advances in general. We always have to be on our feet to learn the new thing, always just be humble even as you're learning because you can never learn everything and you can never master all the domains.

Hope you enjoyed this series!

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