Like many (if not most) people with a Ph.D. in the humanities, I am currently working in a field well outside the realm of my graduate school training. I have been in my current field of work (software engineering) for several years, and thought it might be nice to share some of my thoughts looking back on my career transition.
Seven years ago (2017), I earned my Ph.D. in history, specializing in ancient Rome and early Christianity. Six years ago, after a year as a history lecturer, I left academia and taught myself to code, in the hopes of gaining more job opportunities with long-term income potential and geographic flexibility. I was fortunate that I was able to afford to switch careers. Thanks to tuition waivers and graduate stipends, as well as help from my parents and in-laws, I left grad school with no student debt. And with my wife’s modest but full-time income, there was no concern about paying rent or getting food for the year that I was working–with little to limited income–on learning new skills. After taking numerous online courses and attending local meetups, I eventually got a part-time contract job at a local development shop doing some front-end web development work, which eventually turned into a full-time position as a full-stack developer at the same company. After a few years, I left that position to work remotely for a Fintech company as they redesigned their customer-facing app, and I then left that position to take a big opportunity at a world-leading tech consultancy, where I am currently working.
On the whole, I think I can certainly call my transition a success. Graduate school imprinted into me the notion that the career I was preparing for was so competitive, and jobs were so rare, that I would have to constantly fight for work, and be grateful for whatever scraps came my way. I constantly felt like I had no control over my fate–I would have to end up wherever and with whatever paltry offerings the job market (if it can even be called a market) presented me. On top of that, my wife, also an academic (we met in grad school) faced the same challenges. The odds of both of us getting faculty jobs was sparse–to say nothing of getting jobs in the same location.
In software, however, I have more income and more marketable skills than I would have been able to get in just about any academic position available to me. And since I work remotely, I have flexibility on where I live. What’s even nicer is that I get to satisfy a lot of the same drive for knowledge that pushed me into graduate school in the first place.The excitement I found in deciphering and analyzing the structure of ancient languages turns out to translate well into the world of code, where structure, syntax, and composition factor heavily into what makes a solid, maintainable codebase. And while I may not be translating Latin manuscripts or analyzing Greek orations, I did find a field that consistently gives me opportunities to learn. Graduate school taught me that the more you know in a certain domain, the more you find there is to learn, and that’s exactly what I’ve come to realize in software. I have worked long enough now to feel comfortable with a number of different domains, but I never think that I know everything there is to know about any of them. I’m always finding new knowledge and new ways of applying my current knowledge.
But there’s another side to this constant drive for knowledge. Graduate school inculcated in me a strong sense of impostor syndrome, the idea that I wasn’t enough–that I wasn’t publishing enough and in the right places, that I wasn’t getting enough fellowships, and that I wasn’t sufficiently researching the “hot” subjects that would position me for one of those rare and mystical jobs. It turns out, software is a great place for impostor syndrome. The fact that there is always more to learn–and that what needs to be learned is changing so quickly–means that the nagging voice in the back of my head that asks “are you really enough?” still has a home in my new line of work. Am I keeping up with the latest developments? Am I learning the right skills to keep myself from being replaced by AI? Will I be doomed by some basic piece of technical knowledge that I have never had to think about but that any freshman in an intro C.S. course would know?
What I’ve come to realize is that a lot of what I disliked about academia wasn’t really about academia. Sure, the insecurities become more crippling when the lack of academic jobs drives competition to the levels that it’s currently at. But the constant drive for knowledge and the constant fear that I’m not enough really are two sides of the same coin. In a world where we are constantly subjected to new information, it is very easy to feel like we don’t have enough. And when competition for jobs is so high–which it is in software, albeit with a lot more job opportunities out there–it is very hard not to get caught up in measuring one’s self against one’s peers.
It can be challenging to separate different versions of myself, especially when I work at home. As a graduate student, I had to constantly remind myself that I was a whole human being, that my research or my position in my program did not define me. I often find a similar challenge in software. I have to remind myself that I am not defined by how much I know, what my personal projects look like, or how frequently I commit to open-source projects. I am a husband, a father, a friend, a cyclist, a cat-lover, a trekkie…the list goes on. Software is something that I love, and I am very happy to have found it, but it is only one part of my life, not my defining identity.
I have no doubt that seven years ago I made the right choice in switching careers. I am very happy with where I am now in my professional career, and I hope to continue growing in software for years to come. But I can’t forget where I came from, and it’s significant to me that so much of what shaped me as an academic–both positive and negative–continues to shape me as an engineer.