How to move into the tech industry
Choose a role and learn how to approach the move
Reasons to move into the Tech industry
Why would one want to move into the tech industry? For many reasons, I’ve convinced and helped some friends to change their careers to it, and all of them are way happier now. These are the main topics I sold them in order to make them come to the dark side!
Salary
Salaries are overall higher in the tech industry. Since there is, currently, a lot of demand and not so much supply salaries tend to be higher when compared to other areas. For example, a junior developer or qa can easily earn something between 30000€ to 60000€ gross/annual. The value significantly increases once that person gets to the mid and senior levels. A Senior developer or qa can earn something between 60000€ to 120000€. There are, of course, people that earn even more, these ranges are what I find to be the most common and already include some very successful cases regarding salary. Other roles mentioned in this post will share a similar range with some degree of variation.
Salaries will vary mostly depending on the industry field (e.g. crypto, AI) location (Europe, USA), and seniority level.
Salary ranges in Europe in 2022
Salary ranges in the USA in 2022
Bear in mind that multiple people living in Europe are working for US and UK-based companies where the salaries are higher than in Europe.
Life Quality
If you like remote working that is something that you can currently easily achieve in the tech industry. Even if you don’t work fully remotely a lot of companies offer hybrid formats, like 2 days in the office and 3 days at home. Some companies are already offering 4 days work weeks instead of the traditional 5 days per week. A flexible schedule is easy to find since most companies practice this somehow, this allows you to pick up your kids from school, go to the doctor, and do anything you need to do during the day without being punished. People are usually quite happy and since there is not a lot of competition the work environment is usually healthy and fun.
Job stability
Even people that are currently being laid off, since a lot of tech companies took a hit with the current economic situation, were able to quickly find another job doing the same thing and sometimes even increase their benefits (salary or other perks). People that were not laid off are still changing when a better opportunity appears, this happens quite often. This leads me to conclude the market is still very much alive.
Fun
Ok, this one is subjective, but you may discover that being on the side of building software, regardless if you are coding it, deciding its features, or helping improve the building processes can be quite fun. One might even say that Mondays will not be dreaded again!
How I shifted from the Law sector into the Tech industry
I was on a horrible law internship experience for almost a year when I decided to quit and do something else as I was really unhappy there. I Spent some months searching when a good friend of mine talked me into trying a QA internship position at a German company that had an office in Portugal. I’ve been a complete nerd all my life and spent countless hours playing Counter-Strike and other games on my old pc, so you can imagine that compared to the law internship the possibility of working testing software seemed way better to me. I studied the role to the best of my efforts and luckily I was accepted for the internship. My QA career started right there. After that, I got hooked and started learning more and more. Eventually learned how to code automated tests (which, btw is not as hard as coding complex software) and started having even more fun performing my role.
Possible pathways to enter the tech industry
There are many roles in the tech industry, I will mention the ones I know best and I believe to be the most common.
Technical
Technical roles will require technical expertise, like coding, testing, and being able to make technical configurations or use technical programs.
QA
Quality Assurance, someone responsible for the quality or a portion (like a feature of a site, for instance, a cart feature on an e-commerce site) of the product for a business. This person will work along with the developers testing their code, to find bugs, either manually or by creating automated tests. Additionally, this person’s efforts are focused on the user of the application, and whatever task is done to help prevent the user experience to be broken falls within the QA range of possible duties.
QA Analyst
This kind of QA role tends to be focused on the analytical side of the job. You won’t usually see this person coding any automated tests, or configuring tests to run in an automated way. You will see them focused on mimicking the user in their tests and trying to protect the user’s expectations about the respective application. In my opinion, it is still a technical role, although there is a lot of point-and-click testing, these QAS will use a lot of technical programs to be able to test the application. They are usually a good source of information on how the application should work and what are customer expectations. Coaching developers on quality assurance good practices is also a big portion of this role.
QA Engineer
I see this role as an extension of the first one. In my mind, the QA engineer can do everything a QA analyst would do but will have the extra capability of creating test automation suites and configuring those to run in an automated way. They are also able to review test code by their developer peers and perform other types of non-functional tests, like performance or stress tests. They are usually focusing their time on generating and maintaining automated tests sharing that effort with their developer peers. Coaching developers on quality assurance good practices is also a big portion of this role.
Developer
If the QA is testing code the one who developed such code was the developer. These guys are the ones building the application which, if it works as expected, will generate the business some money. QA is there to help prevent the business from losing money by reducing the number of bugs that get to and affect the customers.
Full stack
This kind of developer can code multiple systems required for an app to work. They will build the services (the logic part of the application) and the layout system (the pretty part of the application, or in other words the User Interface). They have a good range of knowledge and can help out when a team needs someone for either backend (services) or the frontend (User Interface). These guys, because of the nature of their role, need to know how to use more technologies and coding languages.
FE
This guy is focusing his skills and efforts on the layout of the application. They need to handle multiple browsers and are usually good with javascript as well as HTML and CSS.
Backend
This developer works on the service and logic part of the application, when you log in on a website although you do it through a pretty user interface some magic happens in the background. That was done by a BE developer.
Mobile applications
Developer who codes applications that can be downloaded and installed on your phone. These guys are usually split by platform, meaning some will code apps for Android and others for iOS.
iOS
Developer focused on coding apps for iOS. Usually has to deal with iOS versions, Xcode as well as C++ and/or Swift.
Android
Developer focused on coding apps for Android. Usually has to deal with Android versions, Android Studio as well as Kotlin.
DevOps
DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle. These guys, much like full-stack developers, usually have to be capable of knowing multiple technologies and tools. To mention a few: bash, Jenkins, docker, Kubernetes, and many more.
Non-technical
Non-technical roles do not require technical expertise to be performed. These guys are usually good with the so-called “soft skills” and are focused on helping the business succeed through other means than coding or performing other technical tasks.
Agile Coach/Scrum Master
A person responsible for helping one or multiple teams to implement and follow agile practices and processes to facilitate the Software Development Delivery and to help generate stability and predictability so expectations of multiple interested parties can be managed.
Product Owner
This person is focused on the business side of things. As the name shows, he owns a part of the whole product and can influence the business by making business decisions, like creating a feature and getting with the team to create the tasks needed to deliver the said feature.
Team lead
Someone whose responsibility is to lead the team toward the company’s goals. That includes managing people’s careers, like performance assessments, conflict resolution, and promotions, removing blockers in the team’s way, and managing stakeholders’ expectations and the team’s delivery capabilities. There are vacancies for this role that expect a high level of coding skills, I purposely did not include that one here as it is not an entry point for someone that is not in tech.
Recommendations
My recommendation, if you want to move into the tech industry, is to take a look at the list of roles and see what would you like best. I do not advise avoiding coding because it may look scary at first glance. If you think you would like to go for a technical role do not immediately avoid it. With enough perseverance and a good learning strategy, anyone can learn it. The way I see it the demand is higher for the tech roles so that may be a good reason to still try it.
In my own experience and from what I usually see happening the most common entry points are QA and developer, followed by agile coach and product owner and very rarely team lead.
Worth noticing that once you are in the tech scene it is possible to change roles. I’ve seen countless times people going from Developer to team lead, or from QA to Team lead, or from QA to Product Owner, and so on.
My advice is that you set a goal and start looking for the next steps. Maybe enroll in some online courses to learn the skills (like coding or testing), and/or look for some courses or training that guarantee an internship placement (they are pricey but make a big difference).