He quit a senior engineering job to start over as a developer

From the cashier to HQ

The product Naqiuddin works on now sits inside fuel stations. He is a software engineer building a point-of-sale system for fuel retail, and he works across the whole stack, front end and back end. "Whatever you see when you go to a fuel station, from the cashier to the HQ, it's part of our system," he says. Asked whether it is a big company, he allows himself a small answer: he would say so.

Most people call him Din. Today he is a software developer at Silentmode Sdn. Bhd. Nothing on his CV predicted the job. His degree is in mechanical engineering, and until he made the switch he was a senior project engineer in the construction industry, doing project management on building projects.

The route from one to the other took in a failed detour into data analytics, a resignation from a senior role, four months of full-time study at Sigmaschool, and somewhere between 70 and 80 job applications. He tells the story evenly, but none of it was casual. He walked away from a salary he had spent years climbing towards, and he did it on purpose.

Senior in two years

Construction had gone well for him. When he started out as a project engineer, he set himself the target of reaching a senior role within five years. He got there in two. By any normal measure it was exactly the kind of career you do not walk away from, and the people interviewing him later would keep asking why he had.

The restlessness started in his third year. He began to feel he wanted to do something more than he was doing. At first he looked for that something within his own field, asking what more he could do as a project engineer. Then he started looking outside it.

In 2021, data analytics was the hot career. Companies were hiring for it everywhere, and he wanted in. So he built a routine around it: come home from a senior engineering job, then put in an hour or two of online courses before bed. When the interviewer calls that discipline, he shrugs it off. To him it was simpler than that: it is about how much you want to put into it.

“If you are really interested in it, this is the only life that you have. You've got to do it now or you're going to regret it forever.”

The wrong lesson from a failed detour

The data analytics plan did not survive. He did not make it through, and worse than the failure was the conclusion he drew from it. "Initially I thought that maybe the coding part is not something that I can do," he says. So he shelved code completely and went looking for something else, trying 3D modelling among other things.

It took a year or two before he went back and audited the wreckage. When he reviewed his old data analytics projects, he noticed something he had missed the first time: he had actually liked writing the code. What he had no appetite for was the statistics and probability wrapped around it.

That reframed the whole search. The question was no longer whether he could code, but what career involved coding without the stats. The answer was software development. By then, though, he was five years into his construction career, and he remembers thinking that he was getting older. It had been a long route just to reach the starting line.

Quit first, then learn

He researched his options properly, the way a project engineer would. There was no shortage of advice online telling him he could self-learn his way in, and he had already tried that route. This time he made a harder call: if he was serious, he would not do it on the side. "If I really don't want to stay in my current job, I might as well quit and put my full focus on learning," he says.

A bootcamp was, in his words, the safest way in: it guarantees a more stable learning process than trying to piece together resources online. The logic behind it was specific to his situation. He was quitting a senior position and stepping off a salary climb; if he then got stuck alone with no one to turn to, the stress would compound. Structure was his insurance policy.

Did he regret quitting? Not really, he says first, and then more honestly: a little, along the way. On hard days he would catch himself thinking that if he had stayed, he would not have to go through all this stress. What kept him steady was that he was not learning alone. Joining a class with an instructor and friends, he says, helps with your mental stability.

His expectations going in were modest and precise: proper guidance first, moral and mental support second. Both turned out to be true, and he says the experience reached and exceeded them. He loved the class, and he says so without hedging.

Online from KL

There was one practical constraint. He lived in KL and the campus was too far to commute to daily, so he studied online, coming in only for the occasional lunch and bonding session. Given the choice, he would have been onsite. The human interaction matters, he says; without it, like lockdown, you go a bit crazy.

The bootcamp day had a structure he leaned on. Class ran from morning until afternoon, and from afternoon until evening were office hours, time explicitly set aside for reaching your instructor. His instructor, MJ, helped a lot, running one-on-one sessions with him whenever something would not click.

Classmates carried the other half of the load. After class, someone would admit that a topic was hard for them, and one of two things happened. Either others confessed the same confusion, which told you that you were not the only one, or someone who had understood it better filled in the gap.

His warning to other online students is blunt, because he lived it. Once you turn off your camera, you are basically doing it alone. The fix is to reach out early, something he was bad at himself. He would sit on a problem, convinced it was doable alone, until too much time had gone. "You can attempt to solve it alone, but if you struggle for too long, it's better to reach out."

Admitting you don't know

Ask him the hardest skill he learnt at Sigmaschool and he does not name a technology. "One thing that I've learned is the skill to accept that you don't know everything," he says. He sees it as the first step of any successful learning: act like you know everything and you will learn nothing. And it does not expire with seniority. Even a senior, even a tech lead, has to keep the hunger to learn and drop the ego of already knowing it all.

The second lesson was meticulousness. In software, every colon, every semicolon, every dot carries weight, and early on his code was full of small omissions that broke everything. So he built the habit of double-checking his own work, and a calmer way of reading errors. Do not assume you made a big mistake, he says. Sometimes it is just a small dot. Miss one, and everything breaks.

A task app from his old job

For his final project, built in the fourth and final month, he wrote a task delegation app. The idea came straight out of his project engineering days, where one problem followed him around: he kept mixing up the tasks he had to do himself with the tasks he had handed to other people. Task-tracking software existed, but everything he had tried felt too complicated. He wanted a tool that focused purely on delegation.

Building it changed something in how he saw himself. It was surprising and exciting, he says, to find he could solve his own problem with code. It was hard, but doable, and he credits the first three months of the course for that: the final project was where everything learnt earlier got implemented at once.

His timeline was tighter than everyone else's. Raya fell in the final month, taking a week with it, so where his cohort had four weeks, he had three, and sleepless nights to make up the difference.

The project earned its keep later. In the interview for the job he eventually took, there was no live coding test at all. "They literally brought out a laptop and told me, open your GitHub," he says. He opened his code and explained it, and being able to explain it was what they appreciated. His takeaway: the more projects you have done, the more practical experience you can point to.

Graduation and the dread after

His most memorable moment of the bootcamp was graduating, and he is honest that it cut both ways. Good, because he had finally achieved something he had worked at for four months. Bad, because now the reality started: finding the job. For four months his whole world had been learning; now it was applications.

He felt the dread every career switcher knows: would interviewers pass on him because he did not have a proper computer science degree? A little, initially, he admits. He answered it with a decision rather than a feeling. Sometimes in life, he says, you need to have full confidence in yourself. He had graduated as a mechanical engineer, and that had to bring some value to the table too.

The interviews themselves taught him what actually gets probed. The first question, every time, online or in person, was why he changed careers. The entire second half was some version of: can you do what we need you to do, tested through take-home assessments or live coding. Excel at that part, he found, and having or not having a computer science degree stops being a problem.

Seventy applications, one internship, one offer

The numbers were brutal. He applied to over 70 or 80 roles, and the rejections stacked up across roughly two months. The doubts came with them: maybe he should go back to construction, maybe he should quietly start applying to project engineering roles again. There were some thoughts, he admits. "But another part of me was like, I've done four months of learning. Don't give up yet."

He had a frame that kept him going, and it was an engineer's frame. Going back to construction would turn the four months into a waste of time. Fighting through would turn them into an investment.

The investment paid out in stages. About two months after graduating, he landed a one-month internship with a startup. Before that month was even over, a full-time offer arrived from another company. Along the way, he says, he just had to trust himself.

The interviews held one more surprise: even the live-coding assessments let him Google. Now that he works as a software engineer, he understands why. Developers Google constantly and use ChatGPT every day; the real skill is knowing what to search for and understanding what comes back. "It's whether you can Google and understand what you're Googling, or whether you know what to Google. That's the key part." Knowing what to search, he points out, means you have already defined the problem, and that is the first step to solving it.

Chasing senior, again

He measures his new career against his old one, deliberately. In construction he aimed for seniority in five years and got it in two. So his target in tech is the same: attempt senior in two years. With that goal set, he says, he will learn as much as he can to reach it.

He is equally clear about what happens if he misses. Even if the title takes longer than two years, he is not troubled by it. The goal is there to set the pace of the learning, not to pass judgement on him at the deadline.

A backup plan, then trust yourself

His advice for anyone switching careers, especially from a senior position like his, starts with full support and immediately moves to planning. He had plenty of doubts of his own: can I do this, can I really make it work. His answer was to plan it out, including the uncomfortable part. What do I need to do, and if I fail, what happens then? "There's no doubt we don't know how the future is going to be. So at least when I have a backup plan, I have a sense of peace of mind."

The backup plan is not a lack of commitment. It is what made full commitment possible. Once the plans are all laid out, he says, you just have to trust yourself, because your number one enemy is yourself.

And the reason to move at all is the sentence he keeps coming back to. "If you are really interested in it, this is the only life that you have, man. You've got to do it now or you're going to regret it forever." He is sure he could have stayed in construction and been successful, no doubt about it. But two or five years down that road, he knew the question waiting for him: what if, back then, I had just gone with it? He chose not to meet that question. His sign-off is for everyone still weighing it: he hopes everyone who wishes to transition makes it to what they want.