I briefly mentioned in my first blog ever that I am Java Developer at Bank of America and this is a good opportunity to talk about that some more. Prior to joining the development team I was working on the quality assurance side of the business. I joined the company as a software quality assurance analyst with very little experience in the tech industry but just like many folks in this program I had a strong willingness to learn, grow, and give my absolute best. After two years of being a QA at BofA I was approaching my three years of total work experience of being in the tech industry.
Decision time. Not sure about the entire industry but for me this was a pivotal point where I was starting to become a subject matter expert (SME) on my QA team and was being directed career wise to a senior level position on the team. I had to decide if I was going to stay in QA and work towards the Senior title/pay raises in QA or if I was going to work towards my dream of becoming a full fledged Software Developer in the tech industry. Spoke to many pears and colleagues (Suresh, Partha, Vlad, and Vijay) who were instrumental in motivating me towards Software development. I was getting really comfortable with the QA work, technologies, people, pay, and career growth. The thing is, if I had not pivoted at that time I highly doubt I would have left QA after planting my roots more deeply and getting a salary hike.
There is a lot more to the story but I think it would be too long for a blog to tell all the details. After some highly sophisticated googling and searching on reddit I decided to apply to Oregon State University(pre covid for winter quarter 2018). I believe I have always had the technical ability and skills to be a developer but I never had the confidence or metrics to showcase my abilities. My admission to OSU was probably one of the best things to ever happen to me and it gave me the structure and guidance to properly learn the basics and foundational knowledge of computer science, genuinely. Course after course I slowly built up my confidence, after breaking down crying a few times, and started applying for jobs at BankofAmerica and elsewhere. Thankfully I was able to transition to a dev team at BofA but I had a lot to prove.
After a year of hopping around a few teams and applying a lot of what I had learned in school I was finally placed on a permanent role working on a legacy Java application. It has been two years since then and in that time I have progressed through the OSU program and am right at the finish line. I have to say, working and going to school was challenging for me due to some existing health issues and a few more that I developed along the way(e.g. am now allergic to dairy and alcohol). The dairy allergy is quite brutal actually, never really noticed how much dairy there is everywhere until it started affecting my health. I have to say that although OSU was able to help me accomplish my dream, I cannot wait to be done with it so I can focus on learning new technologies like react native or swift for ios mobile development.
More coffee with Java logo because why not? This image is from unsplash.com and not one I took myself. Now that I think about it I really need to buy a coffee cup that has Java on it.
