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

Five years in construction

Naqiuddin — Din to his friends — spent five years in construction as a project engineer, running project management. He had aimed to reach seniority within five years and got his senior engineer role in two.

By his third year, though, he wanted to do more than he was doing. Data analytics was the hot career in 2021, so he put in an hour or two of online courses every night after work. It didn't work out, and at first he drew the wrong lesson from it. "Initially I thought that maybe the coding part is not something that I can do," he says. He tried 3D modelling instead.

A year or two later he went back and looked at his old data analytics projects, and noticed something. He had actually enjoyed the coding. It was the statistics and probability he had no interest in. So he started looking for a career that involved code without the stats — and found software development.

Quitting was part of the plan

By the time he committed, he was five years into his career. He decided that if he was serious, he would not learn 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.

He chose a bootcamp deliberately. He had tried self-learning and knew that if he quit a senior position, got stuck alone, and had no one to turn to, the stress would pile up. A bootcamp felt like the safest route — a stable, guided learning process instead of hunting for resources online.

Did he regret it? Not really, he says — maybe a little, on the hard days. What kept him steady was not studying alone: an instructor and classmates "help you with your mental stability".

“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.”

Learning online from KL

Naqiuddin lived in KL and the campus was too far to commute daily, so he studied online, dropping in occasionally for lunches and bonding sessions. Classes ran in the morning, and afternoons were office hours — time set aside to reach your instructor.

His instructor, MJ, gave him one-on-one sessions whenever he had trouble understanding something. His advice to online students is blunt: you are alone once the camera goes off, so reach out early. "You can attempt to solve it alone, but if you struggle for too long, it's better to reach out."

The hardest skill he learnt wasn't technical. "One thing that I've learned is the skill to accept that you don't know everything," he says. The other was attention to detail — in code, one missed dot breaks everything, so he learnt to double-check all his work.

A task app born from his old job

For his final project in month four, he built a task delegation app — an answer to a problem from his project engineering days, where he kept mixing up his own tasks with the ones he had delegated. Existing tools felt too complicated, so he built something focused.

His cohort had four weeks for the final project; Raya took one of his, so he did it in three, with sleepless nights to catch up. The payoff came later: in the interview for his current job, there was no live coding test. They handed him a laptop, told him to open his GitHub, and asked him to explain his code — and he could.

Over 70 applications later

The job hunt was the scary part. He applied to over 70 or 80 roles, and the rejections came with thoughts of going back to construction. Another part of him pushed back: "I've done four months of learning — don't give up yet."

About two months after graduating, he landed a one-month internship with a startup — and during that internship, a full-time offer came from another company. Employers, he found, cared less about his qualifications than one question: can you do the job? Assessments and take-home tests decided it, and most interviewers were fine with him Googling — knowing what to Google is the skill.

Today he is a software developer at Silentmode Sdn. Bhd., working full stack on a point-of-sale product for fuel retail — the systems running from the fuel-station cashier all the way to HQ. Having reached senior in two years in construction, he is now aiming to do the same in tech.

Have a backup plan, then trust yourself

His advice to anyone switching careers from a senior position is to plan it out properly. He had a backup plan in case it failed — "at least when I have a backup plan, I have a sense of peace of mind."

But once the plan is laid out, he says, you just have to trust yourself — "because your number one enemy is yourself." His hope is simple: that everyone who wants to transition makes it to what they want.