I’m definitely not a super hero, but I still have an origin story! At least, in relation to how I got into technology…
If you’re interested to hear about how I got started, check out this episode of the #WeBelongHere podcast:
Here is a little summary of the episode:
On today’s episode of We Belong Here, Lauren interviews PeterJohn Hunt. Who tells the story of how he went from convincing his first job to take a risk on someone who had literally zero formal education to becoming the Chief Technology Officer at Useful Group in Chicago.
PeterJohn Hunt is 1 of 9 children and was homeschooled throughout his educational career. He was interested in tech but didn’t have access to the traditional educational tools to learn it. He didn’t love the traditional parts of academia and thus was not ever curious about pursuing a college degree.
After high school, coding wasn’t of interest to him as the stereotype of being a coder looked unappealing and tedious. So instead he found a glorified internship skimming log files. Ultimately he became curious about automating that process, which ultimately was his introduction to coding in that he experimented with writing Python scripts to make his job go faster. Once he was able to see the value and application of learning technical skills, he became passionate about teaching himself and helping others solve real-world problems with code.
It was then that he started knocking on doors, trying to convince employers to hire him on as a software developer. He was looking for someone to take a risk on him and believe in his problem-solving abilities, despite the fact that he did not have a formal education in the subject nor did he have much experience in coding. He promised a small agency that it would only take 4 weeks of online learning and he would be able to perform for them. And it worked! They took the leap of faith and hired him.
Today, as someone in charge of hiring for Useful Group, he looks for those who have that same fire inside of them. He searches for candidates that can demonstrate self-owned learning and those who are curious to approach problems in an out-of-the-box manner.
Check out the whole podcast at: https://webelongpodcast.com/ and follow Lauren Lee on twitter: https://twitter.com/LoLoCoding to stay up to date with new episodes