From lawyer to programmer: my road into tech

I live and work in Santa Clara, California, as an Automation QA engineer at a well-established German company with offices on every continent. My testing experience is fairly thin at the moment — one month — but that has not stopped me becoming the lead for the manual testers and climbing the ladder.
How did I get into tech?

Reaching that point took a great deal of work and a change of profession, which carries its own risks. By the time I emigrated from Ukraine I had already settled on a career in law and had gone on to head a legal firm.

Moving to the USA, I planned to get a local legal education and practise. What testers were and what they actually did was entirely beyond me.

I was so taken with legal work that programming never had a chance of catching my eye. But a couple of months after moving I realised there were far more opportunities in tech in the USA, particularly for beginners.

Following my husband's example — he is a developer — I decided to take on a new craft. That is how I ended up on the PASV course, where my road into code began.

The studying
The course took over my attention and my time completely. There were days when I sat over the lessons from nine in the morning until two at night. I am not exaggerating in the slightest. What saved me was the support of my husband, a programmer of long standing, who helped me fill the gaps in my Java.

Knowing even one programming language makes learning another far easier. So if you already have some experience in tech, the moment when it clicks will come to you much sooner than it did to me.

Several months of hard study brought me to the stage of "beginner actively looking for work". A lack of experience is the great fear of every student about to leave the safety of a course. But put those doubts aside.

PASV combines the theoretical foundation with the practical skills beginners so badly lack. The project you run during the course will tell you, 90 per cent of the way, which practices you can bring to a job. It is genuine first experience, identical to the duties of a QA engineer at a tech company.

What does the course give you?
I know that a great many people have already found work and are developing in their new profession. Their experience is plain confirmation of the course's quality. Ninety per cent of what you need to get hired you get during the course. The other 10 per cent is your own diligence in studying and working, because nobody else can put the knowledge into your head.

The preparatory courses at coding.pasv.us are also an excellent way to work out whether testing suits you at all.

The first job and real experience
The only place I used to look for work was LinkedIn. I built my profile up properly and started going through vacancies that were even slightly close to my new specialism.

What is interesting is that I got two offers on LinkedIn, one of them from an entirely random posting. And by some irony it was at that company that I got the QA tester role I wanted, and I have been there almost a month. At the time of the interview my knowledge matched what the employer was asking for by perhaps 10 per cent. At best.

The interview stage made me as nervous as if I were flying to the Moon. But starting the job was more frightening still. I was afraid the 10 per cent by which I theoretically fitted the role would not be enough.

What reassured me was management's promise that I would have two or even three months to build up my skills, plus a personal mentor to walk me through the company, and that everything would be fine. That is not what happened.

You may well repeat my experience: I was thrown into the deep end and got straight onto the project. There were moments when the first month of work felt equal to several years of practice.

How one bug gave me confidence
For the first two days I dealt with paperwork; on the third or fourth I started testing in earnest. My knees were shaking and I was afraid of falling flat, but pulling together everything I had learned, I started examining the code. You will not believe it, but almost immediately I found a critical bug.

The defect I reported could have cost the company millions of dollars and a reputation built over many years. By the time it was caught, 400,000 devices had shipped with the faulty code and were due to go on sale within two weeks. Imagine the scale of that. The most remarkable part of the story is that the company's own testers had not seen this bug in more than three years.

That was when my faith in myself came back. I had shown myself to be a first-rate specialist, and the employer saw a very capable QA tester. The success of that first piece of testing showed management that I could be trusted and left to handle software testing questions on my own.

In less than a month I became my own boss, calmly finding bugs in the code, reporting them and feeling excellent — despite matching the vacancy by only 10 per cent.


Onwards
My advice to every beginner: do not be afraid. It is impossible to know everything and to match a vacancy's requirements 100 per cent.

At my job the bug tracking system is entirely different from the one on the PASV project. But in two days I installed all the software and worked it out.

Fortunately we always have Google to hand, and it will answer any question. What matters is learning to ask properly — and after the course I have no trouble with that at all.