Tech’s Open Secret: A Great Career Is More Attainable Than You Think

It’s a character we’ve all seen countless times in movies and shows: the genius hacker/coder who types so fast his fingers blur and who says things like, “Mainframe successfully breached.” It’s intimidating, it’s impressive, and it’s complete bunk.

See, tech jobs are so much more diverse than that image suggests. In fact, not only are there multiple ways of working as a coder, there are even roles out there that don’t demand people focus on coding. So if you’re intimidated by the idea of switching to tech — don’t be. Here’s why a great career in tech is absolutely in your reach.

Working in tech doesn’t necessarily mean coding

For many people, the thought of learning a coding language can be daunting. Now, we’ll talk about coding in more detail later, but let’s start out with this: some tech jobs won’t ask you to code at all. We know this seems impossible at first glance, but the tech industry requires diverse expertise. Some of that will involve programming, absolutely. But there are jobs that prioritize knowing how to use digital tools as opposed to digital languages. Here are two examples.

Manual QA

Quality assurance (QA) is crucial throughout tech. As one of our grads_{In QA and Never Looking Back: Kyle Kolodziej’s TripleTen Story} said, “Everyone needs a QA, whether it's an automation QA, or just a manual QA. It's always needed. You can't have a product that hasn't gone through QA.” 

Why? Well, QA is the process by which errors, mistakes, and bugs are discovered and flagged for fixing. Without this, products might break or function in completely unintended ways. For just one example of how catastrophic a lack of testing can be, consider this: because of a QA oversight, a $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the Martian surface instead of orbiting the planet. The problem? An outside company that NASA was working with had set up the module to provide acceleration data in imperial units, but NASA was navigating using metric units. There’s a specific type of testing that could have prevented this — integration testing.

So it’s an important stage of the development process throughout industries. And vitally, for people working in manual QA, it’s just that, manual. Tech companies need people testing their products in the ways that people will use them. The best way to do that? Get people to, well, use them. 

Now, naturally, these companies want their employees to know effective ways to do this, so people in this field have to be familiar with specific tools and know how to develop test scenarios. But nowhere in that process does a tech worker need to code. So a profession in manual QA is open to anyone with a knack for spotting inconsistencies and the communication skills to let people know exactly what isn’t working and in what circumstances.

Business Intelligence Analyst

Business intelligence analytics (BIA) also has widespread importance. Basically, this field is all about looking at data to help people make the right decisions. This can range from guiding marketing approaches to providing recommendations on how to improve public safety to even using data to look at patient trends to predict and prevent health crises.

As you can see, BIA specialists also play a crucial role_{Tech Jobs for Good: Why Business Intelligence Analytics Matters}. And no, they also don’t necessarily need to know coding languages as part of their role. Most of their work revolves around reporting, building dashboards, storytelling, and data visualization. 

As with QA specialists, people in these positions do need expertise with tech tools — making this unambiguously a tech job — but they won’t necessarily need to get in the weeds with programming. In fact, a major component of working in BIA prioritizes soft skills, communication in particular. See, in one of these roles, you’re going to check out data and gain insights from it, but you then need to share that information with decision-makers and convince them of the conclusions you came to.

This makes people who come from communication-centric roles prime candidates for career transitions to BIA — people switching from sales, for example. When one of our grads_{From Sales to Tech: How Sheldon Kinsler Found a New Career and Community} was looking into a new career path, he found BIA and was convinced. “I looked into [BIA] and just said, ‘Yeah, that sounds cool.’”

But you can learn to code

With all that said, we are nonetheless confident that you can absolutely learn to code. As that blurb just above mentioned, we do cover programming languages in both our QA and BIA bootcamps. Specifically, we teach Python and SQL in our QA program and SQL in our BIA program (although we do offer a free bonus course on Python for BIA students).

Python is well known as one of the best first languages to learn. It’s high-level, meaning its syntax (how it’s written) is similar to human languages. So, if you can read and parse this sentence, you can likely also read and parse a line of code in Python after a bit of study. The same can be said for SQL. While it might not be quite as high-level as Python, it is nonetheless a language that is easy to master — especially the basics.

To be fully transparent, we won’t promise that you’ll take a glance at the code and immediately know how it works, though. But our curriculum builds on itself via increasingly more in-depth hands-on projects so that, bit by bit, you start mastering these new languages. And if you find yourself struggling with some code that just seems to never work, you’re supported by a robust group of people — tutors, code reviewers, senior students, and more. 

In fact, if you’re intrigued by the notion of focusing more on gaining coding skills, we might even suggest going for one of our other bootcamps: Software Engineering, for example. Like all of our bootcamps, it’s geared toward people from every background. And we’ve had all sorts come through our bootcamp and find success — salespeople, teachers, and warehouse workers alike, to name a few.

The story of one of our grads

Just for a taste of what we mean: Before Jeremy Rivera_{Balancing College, Work, Family, and a Part-Time Bootcamp to Find Tech Success: Jeremy Rivera’s TripleTen Story} decided to make the switch to tech, he was a box thrower. He was working in a warehouse fulfilling orders on a tight schedule. But he knew this work was unsustainable, especially because of the physical demands that came with the role. “You had to be really careful because if you got injured, that’s it. You’re out of commission,” he said.

In addition, he wanted a career that would be more reliable long-term. So he started looking into bootcamps, and his cousin recommended TripleTen. 

I saw the market value of being a software engineer or a web developer.

Jeremy Riviera TripleTen grad

Jeremy was initially nervous about committing to the pivot. He’d just gotten married, and since he was now using money that was his family’s, not just his own, he wanted to make sure the investment would pay off. “I think most people will always have that tentative doubt right before they jump into something new,” he said.

But he went for it. He dedicated himself to balancing the bootcamp with his work while he was wrapping up a college degree. And as part of his time with TripleTen, he took the opportunity to join an externship.

The externship was for a real company, making a project they could implement and use. With a team of 12 students, we built the front end on an app and built the user experience for that app. Especially when you start learning, you need that extra experience away from the rudimentary project-based structure — the hands-on experience at TripleTen was invaluable.

All of his new expertise, in association with TripleTen’s baked-in career prep, made him more than ready for a new career in tech. In fact, he landed a job before he even finished the program.

He’s far from an outlier

Like we said, people from all backgrounds have made the pivot into tech — and so can you. You can find great careers that are low-code or no-code, and if you want to learn a programming language, you absolutely can. 

So is tech an unattainable industry? Hardly.

For more proof and inspiration, check out our other student stories.