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And I’m about to fail the third time. To understand what went wrong we will need to travel back to a time pre-iPhone, when Internet Explorer was THE browser and Facebook was still invite only. The year when I’ve graduated a secondary school of economics (yes, in Hungary we make 13-14-year-olds choose their profession but that’s a story for another rant).
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So there I was knowing economics and also not knowing what the hell I wanted to do with my life so I opted on no college/university. Since I didn’t have much money I had cheap/free hobbies, one of which was making websites. Mind, this was the time when we used tables as a grid system, version control was having 50 versions of your files with various names stored on an FTP server and every site was designed to work in Internet Explorer. So I got myself a pirated version of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and proceeded to figure out everything on my own (Stackoverflow launched 3 years later). My passion got me a job offer but this was also the time when Web Design/Development was under-appreciated and under-paid, so you know, kinda like it still is (in Europe at least). I had another admin job offer lined up using my English language skills for more money and flexibility so I went with that and that was the end of phase one.
I went on to satisfy my inner child by getting into the movie industry then subsequently left when faced with the reality of it. Ended up in digital marketing, got a bachelors degree in that believing that social media is going to be the best thing ever, connecting brands to their customers, creating brands that would become even more customer-focused. In a few years I’ve realised Facebook/social media was the vilest thing the digital age has created and at this point I wanted out of digital marketing. The escape route I’ve picked: web development.
Things have changed a lot since my last try, though. Gone were the days of Flash, now there was a - slightly - new kid on the block: JavaScript. This was also around the time when Codecademy started so at least I’ve had more resources to learn. Unfortunately, this was also the time when YouTube decided to invite a few companies to run their own YouTube Multi-Channel Networks and it turned out I wasn’t done with either video production or social media just yet.
Instead of coding, I’ve done Audience Development for a bunch of YouTube channels. Once again, I was naive in thinking YouTube was the battering ram to bring down the gates to studios blocking amazing talent from ever reaching an audience. Whilst this was partially true, when I’ve moved to London to play with the big boys I had to become very familiar with the ugly side. To cleanse my palet I ran away to the charity sector where I worked as a Website Officer and got involved in development and UX design again.
This was it, I gave up my well-paying career and started at the bottom as an Apprentice Software Developer then later a Trainee Web Dev and a Junior Dev. Wait what? Didn’t I say I’ve failed?
Well, the apprenticeship was not very challenging, my team didn’t seem to need me or know what to do with me and hence I was very underutilised. This led to me becoming super lazy which was bad so I got a traineeship instead but that was less about training and more about not paying me minimum wage; I was working solo the whole time and was even put in charge of some of the clients and got introduced to some very questionable, hacky, ‘good enough’ practices there. Quickly bounced to the Junior Dev job where they promised I would get ample time for training and mentorship from the more senior dev…yep, you’ve guessed it, that never happened. I was working on solo projects from week 1 and Stackoverflow was more helpful than the other dev. So in the end I got into UX Design and coding is once again a hobby.
Lately, however, I’ve started thinking about giving Front-End Development one last shot. Now that I’m living in a new country with hopefully better practices I might get lucky.