We Belong Here: Lessons from Unconventional Paths to Tech

On today’s episode, Lauren chats with Caitlyn Greffly, who made a bold career move in 2019 from selling beer to being a software engineer. She loves the work and is passionate about writing about it, talking about it, and encouraging others to make their own bold career changes.

Caitlyn studied Psychology in college, but after graduating, she found a job working at a beer bar, which led her to spend 7 years within the beer industry doing mostly sales. She became pretty fascinated by beer itself but wasn’t passionate about selling it.

She jokes that ‘All of her big decisions in life were accidents’ - but in a good way! She became curious about data analytics and began to explore new opportunities and coding bootcamps. She is a person who takes big leaps and decided to go all-in on learning to code and the rest is history.

She landed her first role out of her bootcamp pretty quickly and now is a software engineer at Zapproved. She quickly discovered how important it is to find a company with a safe learning environment and a good work-life balance. She now spends a lot of her time dedicated to helping career transitioners and supporting junior developers by sharing her experience. She encourages companies to look outside their traditional hiring pools to search for diverse candidates and is passionate about providing tools and resources for teams about how to support those new teammates.

Caitlyn shares advice and wisdom for those curious to do as she did and take the leap of faith into the tech industry! Give a listen.

Resources:

Find Caitlyn on Twitter @thecaitcode

Caitlyn’s website

Jennifer Brazer’s book From Cubicle to Cloud: How to Start and Scale a Virtual Professional Service Business (11:05)

Dan Moore’s book Letters To A New Developer: What I Wish I Had Known When Starting My Development Career (28:10)