My journey into Software Engineering didn’t start with a line of code.
It started with a job I realized wasn’t right for me.
After four years studying Business Administration, I graduated with a degree but still had no clear idea of what I wanted to do next. Looking at my peers, everyone seemed to be heading in a different direction: some went into Sales, some into Marketing, some into HR, while others chose to work overseas. I began to realize that a broad field like Business Administration didn’t really give me a clear answer to what I should do after graduation.
I started looking for a job and spent almost a month before landing my first job related to what I had studied — a trainee Sales Supervisor position. I thought maybe I should just start working first, and eventually I would figure out what I wanted.
But after about six months, I started to feel that something wasn’t right.
My work involved a lot of interaction with people: communicating, persuading, building relationships, pursuing targets and sales. I could do it, but the more I did it, the more I realized that this wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to spend most of my day doing.
I’ve always been fairly introverted and naturally drawn to technical things. Whenever I encounter a problem, I tend to want to dig deeper and understand how it actually works, rather than just knowing how to use it. I enjoy tracing the root cause, peeling back the layers of a problem, experimenting, failing, and fixing things until I find a solution.
Perhaps what I enjoy most is that moment when something that initially feels vague and complicated gradually becomes clear, and I can turn that understanding into something that actually works in the real world.
At the time, I didn’t have a name for this. But looking back, I think I was beginning to recognize a fairly simple difference: there are jobs where you spend most of your time working with people, and there are jobs where you spend more of your time working with machines, systems, technology, and technical problems.
Neither is better than the other.
One is simply a better fit for you.
And I started to realize that I belonged to the second group.
I liked technology. I liked tinkering with things. I liked understanding why something worked the way it did. And most importantly, I realized that I genuinely enjoyed solving technical problems.
So I decided to make a change.
Not by moving to another job within Business Administration. Not by switching from Sales to Marketing or something similar.
I decided to completely reset and learn Software Engineering from scratch.
It wasn’t an easy decision. I had already spent four years at university studying Business Administration. But I thought that if I had already realized something wasn’t right for me, the longer I waited, the harder it would become to change.
I didn’t want to look back a few years later and ask myself why I knew something wasn’t right, yet still chose not to change.
So I started learning again from almost zero.
I didn’t know how far I would go. I didn’t know whether I would actually become a software engineer.
I only knew that I wanted to try a path that was more aligned with the way I think and the things I was genuinely curious about.
Today, I have been in this line of work long enough for it to sink in, across both Data Engineering and Software Engineering more broadly.
Looking back, I still don’t know whether that decision was the “right” one.
Because how could I have known at the time?
You’ll never know what will happen until you try.
Just do it, man.