![]() “I’ll do what the demand is, and go from there.” #DEVMOUNTAIN SWITCHUP CODE#She started asking about the most popular languages and found that JavaScript was at the top of the list, so she started researching bootcamps with an emphasis on JavaScript while teaching herself with online resources like Code Academy and Free Code Camp. Once there, she would be free to move into a more suitable position if she saw fit. Michelle knew that she had a technical aptitude and was clever enough to learn to write code, and that by doing so she could get her foot in the door of the industry. She knew about someone who had graduated from it, and so she started considering the bootcamp path. Serendipitously, it was around then that she started to hear of a coding bootcamp nearby called Dev Mountain. "I get ten open positions for developers for every one open position for project managers and for every one developer applicant, I get ten project manager applicants.” She spoke with recruiters about the job market and was particularly struck when one told her that: She started reaching out to these companies without getting much traction, but in doing so she kept seeing an abundance of developer roles. She was driven and capable, and she needed to figure something out very quickly. ![]() But she faced considerable hurdles getting into the industry: She was the primary source of income in the household at the time, so she couldn’t just drop everything and start over somewhere new for considerably less pay and having finished her undergraduate coursework but not a bachelor’s degree, the opportunities available to her were somewhat limited. There were a number of tech companies nearby in the “Silicon Slopes”, the burgeoning tech sector near Salt Lake City and surrounding areas, and she remembered how much fun she had working in tech companies in the past. I’ve been a grown-up for twenty-five years, and I have another twenty-five years of a work-life ahead of me, and I can get a lot done in that amount of time! I don’t want to stay where I am.” It was then that she started seriously considering a major change: She felt that she wasn’t going to get any ownership in the company, nor any say in the direction the company went, and that didn’t suit her given the amount of hard work she’d contributed during her stead there. In 2015, after a few years working in IT, Michelle realized that there wasn’t a clear career path other than being a financial advisor - a role in which she had little to no interest. She became the de facto onsite IT person for the company. She was able to lean on her previous tech experience to establish a database as part of a customer relationship management system, as well as her team building experience from her startup days to hire talent and grow the company. with two owners and less than one hundred clients, and helped grow it into a large, successful organization with thousands of clients and hundreds of millions of dollars under their management. She started an early employee at Diversify, Inc. ![]() She eventually left the workforce to focus primarily on raising her children and taking care of her family while her husband Kevin worked in quality assurance for large companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Word Perfect.Īround 2004 Michelle made a career shift and got involved with financial planning and operations. She soon moved to Seattle and joined a startup where she was able to leverage her experience at Word Perfect, now owned by Corel, to build out the tech support team there. Nevertheless, she got involved in the tech space during her college years, working in tech support for Word Perfect. There simply wasn’t wasn’t a precedent or environment that encouraged her to participate, despite her love for puzzles and logic problems. The computer sciences at her school were dominated by an uninviting all-male clique. In school she knew of a Pascal class that was being offered, but she was put off by the programming culture at the time. Michelle was aware of programming at a young age but didn’t get involved in computer science right away. ![]()
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