“You’re basically solving puzzles all day long. I really like that.”
Hi, I’m Kris! I studied history and now work as a full-stack developer at PwC. I’d love to tell you a bit about my experiences in IT, in the Young_Coders Challengership and with the organization I work for.
I have been working for PwC for almost a year now, in the Young_Coders Challengership. I had done quite a bit of work in finance and tax administration before this, so I know the world in which PwC operates well. In addition, at PwC I can do exactly what I love, programming!
But my affinity for IT goes back much further than my current job at PwC. IT has attracted me for quite a long time, but I always thought that building apps is quite boring work, because it would be very static. But when I started doing some game development as a hobby, I found out that this is absolutely not the case.
By now I had made a few games and built a few websites. That’s when I decided I wanted to get into programming professionally. I did some Googling and then I came across Young_Coders.
Why Young_Coders
Well, I ended up with a lot of IT traineeship providers. But what appealed to me at Young_Coders is that they really teach you how to program, where other traineeships focus more on the business side of IT. That’s exactly what I didn’t want. Business IT traineeships you often see because those kinds of people are easy to educate, but I just wanted to learn how to become a really good programmer. When I saw that Young_Coders specifically trains developers, I immediately responded. In addition, they have a fresh, young look and cool customers. That immediately appealed to me.
The choice was actually quickly made. I thought, I’ll just try it and I’ll find out soon enough if it’s something that would fit me. You make choices in your life. Sometimes you make a mistake, but in this case it was the right one!
What I love about life as a programmer is the creativity of it. At first I thought programming was pretty static, but in practice you are constantly doing things in a different way and are constantly solving problems and challenges.
“You’re basically solving puzzles all day long. I really like that.”
Communication
But there is also more to it than that. For example, what I like less is the endless amount of meetings, but that’s part of it. You need to keep in touch with the people you are building the app for, with the rest of your team, and you need to clearly communicate who is doing what. Even though you are not a manager, you are constantly managing. But that’s fun too, keeps it a little social.
But that’s a big difference from purely hobby programming, where you don’t have to consider others. In a professional environment, you’ll notice how important it is to put comments to your code. When you write something, it makes perfect sense, but when you look at code from others – or look back at your own code a few months later – it’s essential to have comments to work with.
That’s my biggest tip for people starting out in programming: teach yourself to add comments to everything!
The bootcamp
Fortunately, I didn’t have to teach myself everything. We received a very challenging bootcamp from Young_Coders. It helped that my fellow challengers and I could all do a fair bit of programming before we started, so the level of the bootcamp was high. We went through it at a rapid pace. The bootcamp was tailored to the technology stack I work with at PwC. We learned a lot about React and FastAPI, which I still work with daily today.
With this knowledge in my pocket, I find that I work in a lot more detail. I understand better what I’m doing, know what to look out for, and take into account things that can go wrong in advance.
The team
The team at PwC that I work in is really nice. It’s a friendly team that makes a great effort to learn new things. We are growing fast, which also means that more and more new Young_Coders Challengers are joining the team. I’ve been here for a while now and I’m able to guide the new Challengers and show them the ropes within PwC. That’s good, because they have high expectations of us. Fortunately, at PwC they quickly saw what we could do for them. I am now a front-end specialist and can sometimes even improve my techleads’ code in that area.
I really enjoy being involved in front-end development, because you see immediate results from your work. The moment I change something in my code, I see it appear or disappear in my other screen immediately. I love that.
A few years ago, front-end was very boring, with just html, css and a bit of Javascript. There is little magic in that. But these days, with React and Angular, you can do so much with it, which is very cool.
It’s also fun to see how everyone specializes in a different way within PwC.
One of my fellow challengers is really incredibly good at back-end, while I’d rather never get into back-end again :-). Everyone does what he or she is really good at.
Soon we will do a project together. We can complement each other well, so that seems like fun, The bootcamp we had gives me confidence that we as Challengers can really do that. We also get that confidence from PwC. I am currently co-building a very large app, with the front-end built almost entirely by me and a fellow challenger. That’s really cool.
Are you hesitating about a career in IT? Then just start like I did by teaching yourself some things online, that way you will find out what you like!
