Tax, headhunting, then a career break that turned into code

Two careers in two years

Adrian's first job was in tax at Deloitte. Six months in, he knew it wasn't for him, so he took a leap of faith and joined a friend in headhunting. He did well there — "very well, actually" — but after a year and a half he could see the ceiling.

The next step up was leading people, and he feared that step would lock him in. "If I jump into that next step, I'll be stuck in that place forever." So he left that too and took a short career break. During the break he came across Sigmaschool, and the coding journey began.

The recruiter who noticed which team placed the most

Headhunting had already shown him where the market was going. His firm had teams recruiting for sales, for accounting, and for tech — and the tech team placed the most people. "The market is booming, people are constantly finding jobs." The post-COVID surge in tech hiring, and the popularity of learning to code online, had kept the idea on the back of his mind.

He also believed the skill was learnable by anyone. "Your code needs to pass. If you have done multiple projects, all your code would have passed, and you would be able to code. It's just repetition." Tech also struck him as a way to future-proof whatever came next, since almost anything eventually touches it.

“Be religious in coding. If you don't code for one day, you would know. If you don't code for two days, your boss would know. If you don't code for one week, everybody would know.”

Why can't I centre this button

The hardest part of learning wasn't any one topic — it was the way an unsolved bug colonises your head. "When you get stuck on something, it's stuck in your head. In the shower, when you're eating — why is it breaking? Why can't I centre this button?"

His way through was to reframe it: all that background churn is problem-solving practice, a brain exercise you learn to be comfortable with. It never fully goes away — all coders will understand, he says. What helped most practically was that Sigmaschool's work was project-based rather than theoretical, so by graduation, building real things already felt normal.

A weekend, a new language, a job

His job hunt after graduating was straightforward: apply online, interview for a few companies, choose the one he liked. Having spent a year and a half coaching candidates through interviews as a headhunter didn't hurt.

The key test came as a take-home project: two days, over a weekend, in a programming language he had never used, arranged around object-oriented concepts — not a website, but a small system to fulfil a contract. He taught himself enough of the language, built it, and that was the job he got.

Four days on someone else's bug

His boss handed him a big project first — a convoluted setup with a global database, a separate library codebase, a backend, and separate front ends for users and admins. He shipped every feature he was asked for and fixed the bugs, picking up backend work and PHP along the way as he grew into a full-stack role.

The sharpest lesson came from legacy code — an old codebase untouched since around 2021. Stuck on a bug, he spent four days trying to work out whether the fault was in his code or the old code before finally asking the CTO. The answer: it wasn't his code at all — and "don't spend more than two hours on this." Some things you dig into yourself; some things you ask about, because asking saves time you'd never get back. Learning to tell the difference, he says, is the real skill.

Repetition beats hype

By the time of this interview, Adrian had moved again — into a project management role at an AI-powered job-search startup, managing developers and shipping product. The coding still pays off daily: he can follow technical conversations with his team, and the way programmers sort things into categories shapes how he organises people. He has since moved on once more, into career development at Boston Consulting Group.

On AI replacing developers, he's dismissive: "People who say AI will replace developers don't know how to code, or have never tried using AI to code." On degrees, he values the discipline they build more than the certificate itself. And his advice to new developers is to manage expectations — the landscape has shifted in the last few years — and to keep practising every single day, because the skill fades fast when you're new.