Afraid to Change Careers? Don’t Be

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- You're thinking of a mid-career transition to tech. The pay is good and it's a growing field, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But you're not sure the world of computing needs a [lawyer, soldier, beekeeper] whose tech expertise to date consists of [working the TV remote, changing the WiFi password]. 

Meet Samuel Gould, 30, a newbie engineer at Twitter Inc. who will lay to rest any concern you might have that your own path to a tech career has been less than direct. On the other hand, you will also learn from him that tech isn't for everybody. As he says, “To be good at it, you need to struggle every day.”

Gould grew up on Massachusetts's North Shore. He was recruited to play on the varsity squash team at Stanford University. There, he majored in biology and minored in economics. But neither was a career option for him. He knew from the start that what he really wanted to be was … an Episcopal priest.

“My mother is a priest,” he says. “From a young age, I was interested in the ministry. I had great mentors in the church. They encouraged me to work in the church.” After graduating from Stanford, before entering the seminary, he became director of youth ministry for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts (established 1784), encompassing 180 churches east of Worcester. He also ran a summer camp for the diocese.

Then one day, something happened. “I had a profound moment,” he says. “I was scheduled to preach and profoundly did not want to go. I wanted to be ministered to, not to minister. I brought that to the spiritual director at the time. He said it might very well mean I was not called to be a priest. I spent the next six months diving into those feelings.” 

That was in 2014. He had been volunteering occasionally with the squash team of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A new head coach, Thierry Lincou, offered to pay him as an assistant coach and help him launch a career as a professional squash player. “Outside the MIT season, I traveled the world playing in tournaments,” he says. “It brought me to a level I never thought I could reach.” He says he was ranked as high as 162nd in the world. He was the fifth-highest-ranked American on tour and played in the U.S. Open in 2015.

But he was not exactly killing it financially: “The biggest paycheck I got was $400. I survived because of money from coaching at MIT.” So when his fiancee got a job in California's Bay Area, he was ready to follow her and make a new start.

Friends from Stanford pointed him to tech. “I connected a lot with the way they approached their day-to-day,” he says. “They talked about the growth mindset that's involved in being a good engineer.” In 2017, he started in a five-month coding bootcamp taught by a company called Thinkful, which charges $15,000 but rebates the money if you don't get a job in the field within six months of completion. (Disclosure: I was introduced to Gould by Thinkful.)

After graduation, someone told him to apply to Twitter. “I was half-heartedly sending in my resume,” he says, “thinking, ‘Well, there's no way they'll consider me.' I didn't get the first job. But one person who interviewed me told his manager that he needed to give me a look.” He got hired on his second try in the summer of 2018 and is now a “software engineer level 1” on the publisher products team.

Clearly, then, there's room for devout, squash-playing bio majors in computing. The real hurdle is attitude. Says Gould: “It's not something you just learn and do. It's not a career for someone who wants to settle in and be fine with what the status quo is. I'm learning every day, and I feel stupid sometimes, but I'm in a team that I can turn to and ask questions of.”

A big day for him was the first time he answered a question instead of asking one. The learning, though, never ends. “Engineering is a great career for people who are willing to live in that discomfort and be excited about the learning process.”

Oh, and in case you were wondering: Gould and his fiancee are getting married in May. It will probably be all over Twitter.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Eric Gelman at egelman3@bloomberg.net

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