“You must believe in yourself and walk (or at least lie) in the direction your goal.” This is the story of an accountant turned to developer who eventually became a Team Lead and mentor.
There is no better time to make a change than today. The path to a dream profession can be carefully planned from the school desk or thorny and full of adventures. Nataliia Syngaievska, Frontend Engineer at Levi9, shares her experience transitioning from an IT company accountant to a frontend developer on a project in the same company. She found her purpose and grew from an intern to a Team Lead on a project in London in four years.
Head cook and bottle-washer
I’m 100% a techie and have been a fan of math since school. It has always been easy for me, so when I had to choose a future profession, I went to where there is a lot of it – to become an electrical engineer. The training was engaging. Students were taken to a substation and taught to draw diagrams on A1 and solve practical problems. For my graduation project, I calculated a transformer substation for one of the city’s districts. My second degree is in economics. I had no goal to devote my life entirely to finance – I just wanted a more humanitarian education. It wasn’t easy to sit through classes and comprehend this science, but when I finally graduated, I breathed a sigh of relief.
After studying to become an engineer, I plunged into looking for a job in my speciality. The 2000s had just begun, so it was not an easy task. At first, I worked as a retail manager at a company and mostly filled in tables in 1C.
Then I got a job as an accountant in a restaurant chain, and a year later, I retrained as a manager. It was challenging to control the staff, and I am a demanding manager – an exaggerated sense of responsibility and perfectionism are evident. However, my managerial experience taught me how to structure the team’s work and understand administrative issues and planning. These skills helped me in my future position as an assistant at a medical products company, where I worked after my maternity leave.
The path to IT
The IT industry has always attracted me: I dreamed of entering a modern office and working with technology. But I didn’t know how. The door opened from the other side – through the financial department, I could see how everything works in the industry. It’s nothing unusual: I was an accountant and managed sole proprietorships in a product IT company, and then I came to Levi9.
And yet, this was not enough for me – I wanted to create innovations on my own, so in 2015, at the call of my heart, I began to look for ways and opportunities to switch.
After talking to a friend who had been a backend developer for many years, I decided to try myself in QA, but after a few free courses, I realized that I wouldn’t last long – everything was too slow and calm. Instead, I wanted to see the result of my efforts and creativity in the final product, so I chose the frontend.
The areas of finance and development have almost nothing in common regarding hard skills – I learned them from scratch and broke this wall on my own, reading a lot of literature and watching training videos. Instead, perseverance became my superpower in soft skills. I was so immersed in the process that I dropped out of family life – I was constantly working on improving my skills, doing homework, and developing projects. I was mentored along the way by a friend who used to work at Levi9.
The path of a frontend developer was not easy either. It wasn’t easy to structure the information for the first six months without clearly understanding what to teach and why. I received basic knowledge in bits and pieces and somewhat chaotically.
I missed a mentor who would correct and systematize the skills I had acquired. When I was still an accountant at Levi9, it was senior frontend developer Dmytro Yarmak, for which I am immensely grateful. He was a great mentor and kept me from making mistakes – I don’t remember a single faux pas in all my years in frontend development.
A dream team and a fast-paced career
I was also lucky with the team – from the first day of the project, we had a match. The HR department also deserves a lot of credit for this – the girls recruit skilful and exciting people and make good ski partners. And our joint activities are a distinct pleasure. We played Alias, tried to meet every week, and we had vacations before the war together.
I climbed the career ladder in the company quite rapidly – two months as an intern, then a junior, in less than a year, I became a middle specialist, and a year later, a senior.
And recently, I was offered the opportunity to become a Team Lead on a project, so I’ve reached another professional peak. I am still deciding which direction to move, but I know I will stay in development. I want to expand my competence and become a Full Stack Engineer. As a first step, I have already started learning Node.js.
With experience, it doesn’t get easier to perform tasks – on the contrary, everything gets more complicated. And although I still sometimes doubt my abilities, for every “I don’t know how”, my Tech Lead reminds me that over the years of cooperation, there hasn’t been a single task I couldn’t handle. However, to this day, I continue to develop in the field. Mostly in practice and studying the documentation at the same time. Sometimes I write my pet projects using new and exciting technologies.
Onwards and upwards
In IT, you must always move forward, keep yourself in good shape, and be ready to learn all your life. But if something doesn’t work out the first time, you need to believe in yourself, not give up, and walk (or at least lie down) towards your goal. Some of my mentees made a mistake: they thought everything would be easy – a month or two and you are a junior. Their unwillingness to take on a challenge and devote more time to learning prevented them from growing professionally.
Frontend is not just about pushing buttons, so juniors, switchers, and everyone just starting in the field should not be under the illusion that everything will be easy and fast. You need to be patient and persevering.
In my mentoring experience, only one girl got a job as a junior in a Dutch IT company. She was diligent, purposeful, and studied a lot, so she achieved her goal. I am proud of her and glad that the efforts and time invested have paid off. I mentored four friends who also wanted to go to the frontend. It was challenging to explain the basic things that I had learned to do intuitively over the years or, on the contrary, hadn’t used for a long time. But this experience refreshes my memory. I was also motivated by the desire to help – I was supported at the start of my career, and now the ball is in my court.
