From Research Assistant to Front End Developer
in two years
I am a member of some active Facebook groups. In the last 2–3 years I saw posts like this multiple times:
And every time these posts show up, I remember how I decided to change careers. The times when I was unhappy, I didn’t have the freedom to change the environment and get more quality of life.
I feel like the posts like this one you are about to read, encourages people to overcome their fears.
To have a better understanding of the situation, we need to go back to 6 years past my life.
Since the day I know myself, whenever I see an astronaut, a scientist, a laboratory, I had been feeling the butterflies in my stomach. I knew I was destined to become a scientist. I loved Physics. It shaped my life.
So after the bachelor’s degree on Physics, I decided to get a Master’s degree and do some real researching stuff. Learn the techniques. Put my mark on human life, be a part of something improves our life. Publish articles and get recognition. Well, that last part was not my main purpose but every once in a while if I get that, it would be awesome.
With those intentions, I applied and got accepted to Istanbul Technical University. And in terms of Physics, that’s is one of the best you can go to in Turkey. 6 months later I found “the rockstar” instructor (the idealist type, if an article is not worth Physical Review Letters A or B, that article is not worth the publish.)
Here, I was doing my dream job. Constantly doing experiments about Graphene and P-STM which is one of the rarest machines you can find but we built it ourselves because otherwise, the university couldn’t afford due to huge prices. (One of them is currently at IBM’s research lab as far as I know).
My days were spent in front of the software looking at 3 screens and waiting for an experiment to complete at the -1 floor of the ITU Physics department inside the darkness because P at the P-STM stands for photon, so to see the photons, you need to be in the dark. (This is originally more complicated)
Long story short, I spent nearly 20 months in that laboratory. My results were always getting denied harshly by the instructor and need to work in darkness and mostly being alone made me consider my self-worth. Think about a situation you work from 9 am to the next day 6 pm without a break. And you are reminded of how careless, unsuccessful, how you are the worst. Every other day. While your instructor is using your results to do talks abroad. This was my breaking point. Depression issues started to surface.
And I start to think to myself: Do I want to do this? I was feeling like a lonely budgie and my only owner was some douchebag who shouts at me when I wanted to sing.
That summer, I remembered my other hobby. In my 3rd year of college, they thought us to code (in Fortran). It was old but at least I was building something in which I can see the results right away.
With that in mind and roughly 1000 dollars in my bank account(2014), I decided to leave my job at the lab but continue my education while improving my skills in software development and find a job as a developer. Being in the dark for 2 years, I wanted something colorful, so Front End Development was ideal for me. It was colorful, normal people see you as a magician because you create the screens they see first. Not the Back End side.
But 6–7 years ago I had no idea what a Front End Developer or any kind of Developer is. I only heard the keywords like ASP, HTML, Java, C#, C… I decided that I am going to learn, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, Java in order. And I thought Java was the short version of JavaScript.
I found some online free course on HTML and CSS and completed it. But all those keywords they called “tags” were new to me. And I’m not gonna lie, it sounded stupid, what is it? ‘head’? ‘body’? And some browser reads it? Uhh… OKAY??? Should I memorize it? Like writing on a paper and study every day?
Believe it or not, I did that. Wrote on an A4 paper and tried to memorize.
2 months later, studying all day, got me nowhere.
I found it ridiculous. And contacted a friend of mine about what should I do next.
Hey Ozgun, I started learning web development but I don’t know how to proceed. Do you have any advices?
He replied to me, if you know a little bit of HTML, we have an opening but we don’t do web development. You are going to be a Content Editor, sometimes you need to edit HTML and that’s it. (It turned out he was not working as a developer, I was that clueless)
I was desperate and ran out of money. I accepted that.
Turned out job had nothing to do with HTML and CSS. My only duty was to read the texts and find double spaces between words. And get paid moderately. But I sucked at it. It was boring for me.
6 months later I was fired and unemployed again. Plus, my education postponed 6 more months because the company was so demanding.
When I was fired, I realized I forgot what I learned about HTML and CSS and I was still not on the JavaScript part yet.
I continued my studies on HTML and CSS slowly. 6 months later a friend of mine said:
We have a Front End Developer opening but you have to know Bootstrap. And a little bit of jQuery.
At that time, I had never heard of Bootstrap before. Quickly, I opened Youtube and typed Bootstrap.
My idea was to learn as much Bootstrap as I can till the interview day and I knew they were going to want me to do an example project and I had to use Bootstrap. The interview day came, I showed up wearing a “suit” in a hot July noon. All sweaty. They gave me the project, I had around 3 days. I even ruled out learning about jQuery. Seeing all those classes: container, col-md-6 ’s. In my mind I was thinking:
Let’s change the class names so they don’t think I cheated using Bootstrap.
And looking back, it was looking pretty weird. For all container classes, I used container1, container2, and so on.
As you can imagine, they never replied.
So quick recap, for nearly a year, I was telling everybody about my goal of becoming a web developer and yet I was miserable.
Around this time, I was out of money, again. I had to stay at my parent’s house, rarely leaving my room and studying both for my Master’s Degree and to switch careers.
I continued my study of HTML and CSS. Built around 40 single page websites by following KhanAcademy, CodeAcademy, and Freecodecamp. It was again, wake up around noon, start studying, work until you can’t anymore, sleep around 6–7 in the morning and wake up, continue. Also in those times, I already got backstabbed by my instructor at the last minute of course selection period at University, I was without an instructor and I needed one to select which classes I am going to apply that semester. I went to his room and asked “Sir, I think there was an error, I got dropped from your Master’s students list.” He smiled and said:
Yes, I am aware, I did it.
Can’t you add me back?
He smiled again cruelly:
Nope. Bye. Close the door behind you.
I was facing the danger of getting banned from my Master’s Degree which was like a statement for me to the ones that doubted me. Quickly I mailed around 5–10 professors and found the perfect one for me, unlike my previous one, caring, positive person. So with him, I was studying Black Holes this time, doing complicated math stuff using software called Maple, and I had to code in it to calculate my results, which was awesome even though I sucked badly.
Just around that time, a friend of mine told me about a free, government-backed, 6-month web development course she applied and completed. So I applied there too. Before the course, they were interviewing you. You had to be one of the chosen ones. Luckily I was confident of myself, and I made the interviewing teachers believe in myself. Got selected as one of 30 people from around 1000 applied.
That was also one of the turning points of my career. Good thing, the course included Front and Back End side of web development. You start with SQL, C#, and Winforms, Webforms then MVC in .NET environment. With little to no background with OOP, I sucked at writing C# which was the main point of that course. So, for 5 months, 6 hours a day, every day of the week, I showed up to classes and sit there while had the worst percentage to solve any examples or homework given by the teacher or understand the topic taught by the teacher. At least for the C# and SQL part. The last time I was using an actual software language was 2009 and it had been 7–8 years since. Even it would not count because Fortran and C# have not much in common.
There were 15 people in the class and I was the worst student there.
The worst. Hopeless. I hate being the worst one. Our instructor even informed me about it, I can accept failure but I can’t accept not trying. So it was the third time in the last 3–4 years I was sleepless. The course was from 2 pm to 9 pm. I was coming home around 10 pm and studying until 9 am, sleep around 3 hours, and go to course again. I still sucked. I was feeling dumb. About Back End stuff.
One small upside for me was, the teacher never liked writing HTML or CSS. He even told me about it:
Gokhan, I think you are good at HTML and CSS. And I am not a fan of HTML and CSS. Maybe you can take over for a week and teach everyone instead of me?
And to me, that was a great opportunity. First, he saw me the caliber of teaching something, second, this would look amazing on my resume. So I accepted it. Board and the class was mine for a week and I went home and studied all of the HTML and CSS section on W3Schools website. All of it, in only 1 night. I didn’t sleep, created a small personal website as a project for class, and next week, I was pretty confident of my skills to write HTML and CSS. When I started my first job, I understand that I was wrong. But this is a topic for another article.
I think this applies to everything in life but if you want to learn something, you should be brave enough to be ready, to get out of your cocoon and throw yourself into the fire.
I showed those 14 students a glimpse of what Front-End side is about, and I made them create a single-page website using only HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap. I was in a situation in which I had to learn Bootstrap overnight and teach about it. I didn’t sleep that night. While teaching, my eyes were hurting. I was dizzy. Not a big deal.
And I did. This information helped me find my first job.
5 weeks later, the course ended and before it ended, I was already looking for a job in Istanbul. My main objective was to get a job. Regardless of the location. I think in my 3rd or 4th interview, I got a job offer 3 hours away from my home. I accepted it. It was 2016. And the course was ending in 5 days.
I was the worst in that class. Hopeless one. And second person to find a job from that class.
2 years ago I decided to leave my job as a Research Assistant, and now I was a Front End Developer in a Digital Web Agency.
For 4 months I was there, it was all about learning, acting like a sponge to learn as much as I can. Every day, I woke up at 6 am, went to the office after 3 hours of the trip, got out of the office around 7–8 pm and 3 hours trip home. I had around 1 hour to eat and rest. Then sleep. CSS was more than what I thought, it was hard. jQuery was hard. JavaScript was hard. But just like I said, I threw myself into the fire.
Back in 2016, Angular was releasing 4th version, and React was on the 15th version, and I was still learning about jQuery, far away from what the Front End community was into globally, but I was on my course to get better. I had a long long way ahead of me. And lots to learn. I just didn’t know it.
After my first experience as a Front End Developer and minimum salary, I was still clueless about what should be my career path. Found another small company and worked there for another 8 months, I was earning %60 more but the problem was they were thinking they hired a Web Designer who can code. And I was thinking they wanted a developer who can design. At the end of 8th month, they told me they are having financial issues and they informed me that I should look for another job. And I joined another team that my course instructor was building. The course where I was the worst student and gave a workshop. For the first 3 experiences I was only building with jQuery and CSS. Still I was far away from React, Angular, SASS, Webpack. But I was starting to build small projects with React by myself.
Then I joined another company and become a part of a team consists of 15 developers. For me this was the hardest time of my career, it was demanding but luckily all those people were willing to share their knowledge and I even met my unofficial mentor there. We started NGTurkey, the biggest Angular community of Turkey. I dived into the world of TypeScript, Reactive Programming, State Management, and Atomic Design principles.
On my 4th or 5th experience, I was earning 4 times more compared to my first salary. In roughly 3 years.
Does this story end here? If this question about changing careers, yes. But just like that wise man said, all the destinations I reached, created more roads to travel. All the answers created more questions. I am excited to improve my vision, my thought. process, and happy to find the parts of Front End Development I am more interested in.
Changing careers is a tough decision. It’s scary. But it’s less painful than working for a job you don’t like anymore for the next 20–30 years of your life.
My story is a long one, not like “how I become a developer and earned 1.000.000 dollars in 6 months!”. Being a developer takes little to no time if you know a little big about algorithms. It takes a lot more to be a qualified developer and improve yourself constantly. If I could achieve this, nearly without a budget, you can too. I become the developer I am today by lots of open source material and blog posts, free material people post online. Believe me, I didn’t even buy a single Udemy course. I didn’t pay one penny before I was into my 2nd year into my career. Here these articles I try to post as much as I can and I will is a payback to community.
For the people who are interested in this career path without the dead ends I faced, I am adding links to get you started faster than I do.
(Wes Bos has a free course and huge discounts for other courses if your money is not valuable compared to dollars, one of the great guys)
