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It is now March 2021, and it has been exactly two years since I changed careers from a different industry to become what people call an IT engineer.
I was not planning to do anything in particular and had even forgotten that two years had passed, but then I received a message from heaven saying, “Now is the time to write a poem.”
So in this article, as a retrospective, I would like to look back on why I decided to change jobs into the IT industry and what things have been like since then.
I do not know what path brought you to this article, but I want to say in advance that I myself am skeptical of the tendency to sanctify “changing careers into IT engineering.” Recently, when I look at social media, I get the sense that things like “changing jobs” and “dropping out of school” are often praised.
However, compared with someone like me, who changed jobs so easily, I think people who understood their own aptitude from the start, researched the company they joined, and then joined it and performed well are far more far-sighted and rational.
For that reason, although I myself changed jobs very quickly in my first year after graduating, I am negative toward casual job changes that do not lead to career advancement.
With that said, why did I end up changing jobs, and what was it actually like after making the change? I would like to reflect on those questions in this article.
Self-introduction
To begin with, I will write a brief self-introduction along with what my situation was like before and after the job change.
At the time of writing this article, I am 25 years old and entering what would generally be called my fourth year as a working adult.
I graduated from a mid-tier national university in the countryside and majored in agriculture.
(I was not especially diligent, so I do not really have much specialized knowledge.)
I will skip over my usual activities, so please take a look at my Twitter or GitHub pages instead.
Twitter: @yuki_kashiwaba
Ghithub: kash1064
1. My current situation
I currently work as an IT engineer, but not in development or consulting. I do technical support at a software vendor.
My hobbies are personal development, competitive programming, and hacking.
I use a service called HackTheBox, where you can hack legally.
My favorite languages are Python and C++, and also C#.
When I first started programming, my personal development work focused mainly on web applications, but recently I have been studying things like building my own OS.
As for future goals, I want to build both knowledge and implementation skills in security while also studying areas such as computer science.
2. Before changing jobs
Before changing jobs to my current company, I was a general employee at a major B2C company that I joined as a new graduate.
It was popular enough to rank within the top two digits every year in lists of preferred employers for humanities graduates in Japan, so the待 was not particularly bad.
Because it would be easy to identify, I have inserted a small amount of fiction so as not to cause trouble for my previous employer.
Like a typical large Japanese company, nationwide transfers were a given, so at the time I lived in a place that took four or five hours to reach Tokyo by Shinkansen.
There were hardly any stores nearby other than Starbucks, so outside of work I spent all my time either at home or in a cafe using my PC.
I think that environment was definitely what led me to get hooked on IT.
The following article is one I wrote right before I began my job hunt, and when I look back at it now, it seems that at the time I was studying technologies biased toward web development.
It is surprising how much the direction of my hobbies has changed in just a little over two years.
What I learned by looking back on a year of self-studying programming.
Notes from my job search
This is not the main topic of this article, so I will only summarize it briefly.
I had detailed notes from when I was job hunting, so I will quote a few parts from there.
The reason I first thought, “I am going to become an IT engineer!” can be summed up in one sentence: I got hooked on programming.
Before deciding to change jobs, I tried asking and consulting within my company about whether I could somehow move to the internal information systems department, but of course the wishes of someone who had only joined a few months earlier were never going to be accepted.
I could have continued working there for several years and waited for a chance to transfer internally, but life is short, and I could not choose to spend several years merely “enduring.”
That said, as I wrote at the beginning, I myself am negative toward casual job changes that do not lead to career advancement.
As I will mention later, I have also seen a friend end up in a clearly tougher situation than before because they decided to change jobs based only on dissatisfaction with their current situation.
Personally, if possible, I think the best outcome would have been to join a company that matched my aptitude from the new-graduate stage.
Even so, at the time I had already decided that I would change jobs, so I set the following goals for that move.
My current role does not qualify for item 4 because it is not development in the first place, but my current job more or less satisfies the goals I set back then.
- A company that develops its own B2C service
- Annual income of at least 3.5 million yen before tax
- Timing of the job change: sometime between November and February this year
- Development language: Python, Java, or C#. PHP or Swift would also be acceptable
- Workplace in Tokyo, casual dress allowed, and housing assistance would make me very happy
Looking at this now, I wondered why I listed Java and Swift even though I had barely written either at the time, but apparently I was considering mobile-app development roles.
My memory is vague, but I do remember that mobile-app developers generally seemed to have better conditions at the time.
I also had logs about the outcome of my job search, so I will just note the results.
- Companies I applied to: 9
- Offers received: 5
- Selections withdrawn: 2
- Rejections: 2
The reason the number of companies I applied to was small is that I was working in a rural area, so I had to squeeze trips to Tokyo for interviews into my days off.
Honestly, the most troublesome part of job hunting was coordinating that schedule.
In order to interview with as many companies as possible on the same day, I would pack two or three interviews into one day, take an overnight bus home, and then go straight to work in the morning.
Now that remote interviews seem much more common, it would probably be easier.
Advantages I felt after changing careers from another industry to IT engineer
Next are the advantages I felt after actually changing careers from another industry to IT engineer.
I will write about them while comparing them with the points often emphasized in the advertisements I used to see before changing jobs, things like “Let’s change careers and become an IT engineer!”
Ads like that often talked about the following.
- IT engineers earn high incomes!
- Flexible working styles with remote work and flextime!
- Relaxed work in casual clothes!
- Become a freelancer and earn ten million yen even with no experience!
As for “1. IT engineers earn high incomes!”, honestly, I think it depends on the company.
That said, even among IT engineers, the people earning high incomes are those with ability and experience, and the fact that people with ability and experience earn high incomes is true in any industry.
By the way, at my company, salespeople with incentives generally earn much more than IT engineers.
If you want a high income as a salaried employee, I feel like it would be more efficient to aim for consulting, securities, or top-tier sales.
At the start of this year, a story went viral about a train driver making 6 million yen a year whose income was cut in half after switching to become a programmer, and I think that is the reality.
In fact, most of the job listings for inexperienced candidates that I saw when I was looking for a new job offered annual salaries of around 2.5 to 3 million yen.
I set my minimum line at 3.5 million yen, but there were very few openings whose listed salary was even 3.5 million yen or above, and I remember struggling a lot even at the application stage.
Even now, two years later, I have enough income to live on, but compared with friends from university who brag about their high salaries in consulting and other well-paid fields, it feels more like, “Well, I guess this is about what you would expect.”
Next, “2. Flexible working styles with remote work and flextime!” is something I think is absolutely true.
Above all, what I felt most strongly was that there is less unnecessary stress.
This is a matter of my own aptitude, but not having to communicate face-to-face with a large number of unspecified customers every day was extremely comfortable.
Also, though this depends on the company, it was stress-free not having to worry as much about office politics, who was on bad terms with whom, and things like that.
Another benefit was that simply having more days off gave me more room in life.
My previous job had about 120 days off per year, but after changing jobs I now work according to the calendar and can properly take paid leave, so it increased to around 150 days.
To be honest, I was surprised that the number of days off in a year increased by about a full month.
That alone made me feel that changing jobs was absolutely the right choice.
(It makes me reflect that I should have compared and calculated this properly when I was job hunting as a new graduate.)
Another point often mentioned as a benefit of changing careers into IT engineering is flextime, and that suited me extremely well too.
With flextime, if you work overtime when things are busy, you can balance it out by leaving early or coming in late when things are quiet.
Because I am very much from the laid-back generation, I wanted to avoid overtime as much as possible, so the flextime system was extremely convenient for me.
After COVID-19 spread, things effectively became fully remote, making it even more comfortable.
As for “3. Relaxed work in casual clothes!”, well, yes, that is true.
Over these two years, I have worn a suit only a handful of times after joining the company.
This year, because of COVID-19, I have not even taken one out of the closet.
As for “4. Become a freelancer and earn ten million yen even with no experience!”, I am not a freelancer and I do not have anyone close to me who is, so I do not know.
Still, as I mentioned earlier, most low-skilled IT engineers have low incomes.
I do not know whether there really is such a sweet deal where someone suddenly starts earning a high income the moment they become a freelancer, but maybe it is possible if they have strong sales skills or scammer-like skills.
What I feel now that I am in my third year as an IT engineer
From here on, I will write about what I have felt after spending a full two years in the IT industry.
These two years went by much faster than I expected.
In terms of knowledge, I started from a point where I did not even have the Fundamental Information Technology Engineer qualification before joining, then obtained both the Fundamental and Applied certifications, and last year I also obtained the Registered Information Security Specialist qualification.
After a full two years, I finally feel like I have reached the starting line.
But I also felt like I had reached the starting line when I changed jobs two years ago, so maybe I will be standing at the starting line forever…
On the other hand, something I have come to feel often lately is a complex about my lack of specialization.
I do programming and security as hobbies, but recently, no matter what I do, I get frustrated that I cannot seem to break out of the level of “an amateur hobbyist.”
I think the biggest difference before and after changing jobs is that “learning IT technology” shifted from being a hobby to being part of my work.
To put it another way, when I think about my future career, I have reached the point where I am expected to have expertise in some area.
At this point, I do not yet have a very concrete vision of what sort of career I want to pursue in the future.
I am motivated to be involved in cybersecurity, but I have not decided whether that means being a researcher, a SOC analyst, a vulnerability assessor, or some other role altogether.
Whatever kind of career I build, I think what will be demanded of me from now on is a high level of specialization.
At the same time, I feel impatient because I am not currently able to sharpen that expertise.
There are many people in the world who are younger than me and at a much higher level.
In that environment, it frustrates me that I cannot produce satisfying results even in the things I enjoy and work on by choice.
Certainly, I am still only in my third year in the IT industry, and I am a newcomer who did not study computer science from my student days.
Even so, I am afraid that after a few more years, I may no longer be able to work on these things for the fun of it alone.
Summary
This article became a bit unclear in terms of what I wanted to say from the middle onward, but when I look back on these past two years, I sincerely feel that changing jobs was the right decision.
At the same time, when I think about the next several years and decades, I also feel anxious that I cannot remain on the starting line forever.
What kind of life I will have from here depends on how hard I work.