I have worked with a few software developers who made the switch to this industry in the middle of their careers. A major change like that can be scary and raise a lot of fears and doubts, but I can attest that this can work out well with the right personality traits and a supporting environment.

Here’s what I’ve observed.

To keep the writing concise, I’ll be using the phrase “senior junior”1 to describe those that have made such a career switch.

Overcoming the fear

Fear is a natural reaction to any major change in life, especially when there’s risk of taking a financial hit while you have a family to support and a home loan to pay.

The best mitigation that I’ve heard is believing that you can make the change, successfully. It sounds like an oversimplification, sure, as all it does is that it removes a mental blocker and throws out the self-doubt. And yet it works unreasonably well.

It also helps if you have at least some savings to help mitigate the financial risk. A years’ worth of expenses saved up can go a long way in providing a solid safety net.

What makes them succeed

A great software developer is not someone that simply slings some code over the wall and spends all of their day working only on the technical stuff, there are quite a few critical skills that one needs to succeed. This is not an exhaustive list, but I’ve personally observed that the following ones are the most critical:

  • ability to work in a team
  • great communication skills
  • conflict resolution
  • ability to make decisions in the context of product development and business goals
  • maintaining an environment of psychological safety

Those with more than a decade of experience in another role or industry will most likely have a lot of these skills covered already, and they can bring that skill set into a software development team while working with the team to build their technical skill set. Software development is not special, at the end of they day, you’re still interacting with humans and everything that comes with that, good or bad.

After working with juniors that are fresh out of school and “senior juniors” who have more career experience than I do, I have concluded that the ones that end up being great software developers have one thing in common: the passion and drive to learn everything about the role and the work we do.

One highlight that I often like to share in discussions is one software developer who used to work in manufacturing. At some point they got interested in learning how they can use software to make work more efficient. They started with an MVP solution involving a big TV and Google Sheets, then they started learning about web development for a solution in a different area of the business, and ended up building a basic inventory system for the warehouse. After 2-3 years of self-learning outside of work hours and deploying to production in the most literal sense, they ended up joining my team. They got up to speed very quickly and ended up being a very valuable contributor in the team.

In another example, I have worked with someone who previously held a position as a technical draftsman and 3D designer in a ship building factory (professionals call it a shipyard), but after some twists and turns ended up at a course for those interested in making a career switch, which led to them eventually working in the same company I do. Now they ship builds with confidence while making sure that the critical system we are working on stays stable. That developer also kicks my ass in foosball about 99% of the time.

The domain knowledge advantage

The combination of industry experience and software development skills is an incredibly powerful one.

When a software developer starts work in a project, they learn the business domain piece by piece, eventually reaching a state where they have a slight idea about how the business operates, but never the full picture. Speaking with their end users will help come a long way, but there are always some details that get lost in that process.

Someone coming from the industry will have in-depth knowledge about the business, how it operates, where the money comes from, what are the main pain points and where are the opportunities for automation. They will know what problems need solving, and the basic technical know-how on how to try solving them. Like a product owner, but on steroids.

Software developers often fall into the trap of creating a startup to scratch that itch they have for building new things, or trying out technologies that have for a very long time been on their to-do list. The technical problems are fun to solve, sure, but the focus should be on the actual problem that needs fixing.

If I wanted to start a new startup with someone, I’d look for someone working in an industry that I’m interested in and who understands the software development basics. Or maybe I’m just looking for an excellent product owner.

How to help them succeed

If you have a “senior junior” software developer on your team, then there really isn’t anything special you’d need to do compared to any other new joiner. Do your best to foster a culture of psychological safety, have regular 1-1s with them, and make sure to pair them up with more experienced team members as often as possible.

A little bit of encouragement in challenging environments or periods of self-doubt can also go a long way. Temporary setbacks are temporary, after all.

What about “AI”?

Don’t worry about all that “AI”2 hype, if it was as successful in replacing all software development jobs as a lof of people like to shout from the rooftops, then it would have already done so. At best, it’s a slight productivity boost3 at the cost of a huge negative impact on the environment.

Closing thoughts

If you’re someone that has thought about working as a software developer or who is simply excited about all the ways that software can be used to solve actual business problems and build something from nothing, then I definitely recommend giving it a go, assuming that you have the safety net and risk appetite to do so.

For reference, my journey towards software development looked like this, plus a few stints of working as a newspaper seller or a grocery store worker.

  1. who do you call a “senior senior” developer, a senile developer? ↩︎

  2. spicy autocomplete engines (also known as LLM-s) do not count as actual artificial intelligence. ↩︎

  3. what fascinates me about all the arguments around “AI” (LLM-s) is the feeling of being more productive. But how do you actually measure developer productivity, and do you account for possible reduced velocity later on when you’ve mistaken code generation speed as velocity and introduced hard to catch bugs into the code base that need to be resolved when they inevitably become an issue? ↩︎