I'll be honest, the “Tech Industry'' was never the career that I imagined for myself. In fact I never even knew it was a thing until my sophomore year in college. I stumbled across it by accident.
When I was 19 years old, I co-founded an MLM company named Kivia. We were growing like crazy and like any other “startup” we were scrappy and just found ways to make things work. We had employees all over the United States and we were tracking everyone’s compensation using sticky notes on a wall in my Uncle’s basement. Eventually it got so large that we ran out of wall space. We heard from founders of other MLM’s around the valley that they had custom software built for them.
So we started reaching out to custom dev shops and everyone was giving us quotes over $800,000. We were 19 year old kids paying our employees more than we paid ourselves and living in our parents' basements. Every penny we made we were pouring back into the business just to order more products to ship back out to our distributors. We didn't have that kind of money. We didn’t have any money 😭😂
It was at that moment that we said, “It can’t be that hard. Lets just learn how to do it ourselves”. We started down the path of learning HTML, CSS, and JS. It was hard, it didn’t click at first and it made us question everything.
I then got a job at a retail store in Salt Lake City just to support my wife and I while trying to make things work with our MLM. Their process for tracking orders and customer relations was archaic so I started to build out a custom tracking system using excel. I was falling down rabbit holes. Good rabbit holes. Every free moment I had, I was working on this thing. Hours would go by and it felt like minutes. It was hypnotic. We all have that when we get lost in our hobbies. We lose our sense of time. I was falling more and more in love. This was my first introduction into a form of “coding”.
Fast forward quite a few years and that MLM company that we were so proud of is dead and gone, but my passion for Software Engineering was just beginning. I ended up getting my first job in the SaaS world as a technical support engineer to surround myself with like-minded people so that I could learn faster and grow my network. Needless to say, I fell in love even more.
I was hooked from that point on.