Pooneh studied chemical engineering in Iran. Today she writes backend code at Delivery Hero in Berlin. In between came a job she outgrew, an advert on Instagram, the Piscine at 42 Wolfsburg and an internship at T-Systems. None of it was planned in that order, which is roughly the point.
a job that stopped teaching her.
The trouble with her old job was not the field. It was that she had stopped learning anything in it. Tech looked like the opposite: an industry growing fast, changing how the world works and full of problems worth solving. She wanted to learn there, and she wanted to help solve some of them.
So she started where most people start, looking for a Python course. The internet offered plenty of bootcamps. Then 42 Wolfsburg turned up in an Instagram advert.
an advert, and a lot of doubt.
She was sceptical, and says so. A school without teachers or professors sounded odd, and she wondered what exactly she was looking at. Right up to the Piscine she told herself she was only giving it a try, with no decision made.
The campus made the decision for her. The attitude of the people, the culture of the place and the projects themselves convinced her during the Piscine that this was where she wanted to study.
the bits a curriculum cannot cover.
42 rewired how she thinks. In her words, it got her brain working like a developer's. What it could not give her was every tool a real engineering team relies on, and her internship at T-Systems showed her how many of those there are: monitoring and observability, testing, the cloud. She learned them on a real project with real colleagues, and they carried straight into her current job.
She is quick to thank T-Systems for the opportunity. The internship was where 42's way of thinking met a production environment, and she credits it with helping her a lot in the role that followed. This September T-Systems came back to campus for an AMA, with two 42 alumni who now work there.
every ticket is a subject file.
At Delivery Hero she works as a backend developer, and her method there comes straight from the cluster. Every 42 project starts with a subject file. She remembers reading her first one with no idea what it was about or where to begin. Everything looked cryptic. She finished the project anyway, by studying and researching her way through it.
Now, when a task lands that she has no idea how to do, she treats it the same way: it is just another subject file. The lesson she took from 42 is simple. It does not matter that you do not know yet, because you can learn.
from scared to curious.
She arrived with no technical background and very little code behind her. At 42 she worked her way from low-level programming through object-oriented code to high-level languages, backend and frontend. Ask her what mattered most, though, and the answer is not a language.
It is how she approaches something she does not know. Before 42, a completely new problem scared her, and she avoided putting herself in that position. After 42, she trusts that whatever it is, she can teach herself enough to solve it.
The full interview is on the 42 Wolfsburg YouTube channel. Her advice for anyone switching careers, especially from outside tech, fits on a sticky note.
Don't panic and embrace your learning curve.
Pooneh