How a Single Mother-of-four Landed Her Dream Job in Tech: An Update
Last year, Kate Morris shared her story of leaving kitchen design and retraining as a software developer. She recently spoke to our job-hunters at Makers about what she’s up to now.
Here at Makers, part of our careers support includes inviting alumni back in to speak to those currently training, so that our students can ask them questions directly about the job-hunting process and their current workplace.
Recently our careers team invited Kate Morris, a consultant developer who is now a permanent employee at Deloitte. After training with Makers, she went onto the Makers Pathway, which supported her towards securing her current permanent position.
Below is an edited transcript from the session (our careers coach Becks is asking the questions).
What have you been doing today?
I have a ticket that is a bug where some properties aren’t being displayed correctly. I’ve been going through the system, trying to work out how to fix this. I’ve had some zoom calls and Slack messages to get some help from other people and I have been writing copious notes about what’s going wrong and how to fix it.
Tell us more about working at Deloitte.
We don’t wear suits, but we also get to do fun things and play with technology. There’s a lot of emphasis on learning and experimenting — it’s a really good environment.
The other aspect that I liked was that they have a very well thought-out career path.
Everybody comes in at some level and you are given goals and tasks to achieve within the year. All of the reviews are held at the same time. So everyone in the whole company has a review and the senior managers, directors and partners decide what the promotions will be.
In order to be promoted, you have to have been performing at the next level up for at least six months. It’s very structured and well thought out. It was a program that works for me because I know what I’m supposed to do next.
How is being a consultant developer different to being a product developer or working on a single engineering team for a company?
On a day to day basis, it’s no different from any other development role.
The advantage of working for a consultancy is that, as Deloitte has a number of different projects with different clients and different tech stacks, it is possible for me to gain a huge range of different skills and experiences.
Changing projects is reasonably straightforward and if I decide that I want to be a backend developer or do some dev ops or mobile apps, then there are options.
What kind of person is the right person for Deloitte?
It starts with ability, but enthusiasm and quirkiness to a certain extent. My team is a really interesting mix of people, we look like a bunch of developers that were put together by central casting, all different characters!
I was surprised at how diverse an environment it is, tech certainly didn’t used to be! Definitely the thing with Deloitte is everybody’s very enthusiastic about tech, so it can get geeky at points — lots of geek jokes.
Having said all of that, the number one thing is that the people are lovely. Absolutely lovely.
Everybody is very enthusiastic and friendly and helpful, if I feel out of my depth, there is always someone who will help. There’s opportunity to learn and grow and do interesting things. I’ve done all sorts of interesting things.
What are some of the ongoing frustrations that you have?
My lack of ability frustrates me. Also my inability to get to the end product as quickly as I would like. I had a very frustrating day yesterday. I had to pull myself together and get a grip and be a professional, but I learned a hell of a lot about the wrong direction I’d gone in.
Beyond that, you know, coding is frustrating. It just is. It’s really frustrating, or really satisfying, and almost nothing in between.
What would your advice be for a new junior developer in the current job climate?
My first piece of advice is this situation is not your fault. This is a very difficult environment — don’t lose heart. This is a really horrible environment: experienced developers aren’t getting roles, everybody’s on a hiring freeze.
This is a very difficult environment. So this is not your fault. Don’t take it personally, if you don’t get a job tomorrow. If you don’t get a role immediately — continue to study, continue to work, continue to learn and practice.
So that’s really, really important because when you go for your next interview or your first interview, and they asked you something technical, if you have been doing nothing but make muffins for the last four weeks, then you’re going to panic. You’ll freeze and you’re not going to have the confidence you need to work to use your brain and your memory to remember what you know, and show them how amazing you are.
So just keep on the treadmill of learning. I went into CodeWars and just kept practicing. I pushed all of my code to GitHub so that when I went to interviews, I could say to people, ‘Look, I haven’t been making muffins for the last four weeks. I have been teaching myself Java, and this is what I’ve done’. But it has to be clean code, commit often, test regularly and write a good README!
That was key because it showed that I was determined that I was going to get a job and come back into the industry. So that is the biggest thing: continue to show them what you can do.
What are some of the best ways to show people what you can do?
Apart from practicing and pushing to GitHub, I screen recorded myself TDD in the bowling score card kata, and put that on my LinkedIn. That was really interesting because a lot of recruiters say, ‘You know, I’ve seen that on your LinkedIn and it’s not a usual thing to do’.
It shows that I can code, it shows how work, it’s got all my spelling mistakes in it. It’s obviously real and legit and at the end of the day, what they are interested in is, can I code? Can you do the job? You need to show that you can, that is what you have to do.
Did you have a concrete plan or what languages or frameworks or frontends, you’ve learned once you finished?
I definitely had a plan. I was going to be a backend developer because that’s what I was before. So I know all about SQL and Linux and stuff like that and I was quite comfortable with that.
However, when I got onto the project, they said, ‘Okay, these are your options, we have no backend work, so you can go into dev ops or you can be a front end developer’. So I thought, ‘All right. Then I’ll be a front end developer.’
I had no idea what I was setting myself up for. I didn’t know any Javascript or understand React, but I got some textbooks, they organised a couple of courses and everyone was very patient with my very slow learning process.
I did have a concrete plan and it didn’t pan out. As it happens, that’s been a good thing for me. So my plan now is to become a very proficient, full stack developer and become absolutely invaluable. That’s my new plan.
