S24:E7 - Navigating Layoffs with Intention (Natalie Davis)

Today, Saron sits down with Natalie Davis, who shares her experience pursuing software engineering after climbing the ladder in the retail industry for 15 years. In their conversation, Natalie talks about what she has learned navigating the tech industry, how she's navigated layoffs, and why she has grown to be more selective and intentional with prospective new opportunities. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Mark Thompson Cassidy Williams Developer Advocate 2FA Natalie Davis (GitHub) Natalie Davis (Twitter) README Angie Jones ISA (Income-Share Agreement)

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about empowered self-advocacy with Natalie Davis, Software Engineer.

[00:00:19] ND: It’s scary. It feels like if you can get a job offer, take that, but I don’t want to put myself in the position to be right back here in six months again. And I know that it’s very little that I can do to control whether or not that happens, but I can control which opportunities I’m pursuing, which conversations I’m having. So I’m looking for that perfect role.

[00:00:39] SY: On this episode, Natalie shares why, after climbing the ladder for 15 years, she decided to leave the retail industry to pursue software engineering, and now she hopes her story can help pave the way for others after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:55] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:56] ND: Thank you for having me, Saron.

[00:00:58] SY: So when did you first learn about code?

[00:01:01] ND: Let’s see. I was working as a retailer and looking for a way to escape that. And I turned to Twitter and I saw people talking about coding bootcamps and I really didn’t want to go back to college for another four years and have another a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of debt. So that’s when I started researching like, “Is this something that I could be happy doing?” And I found that I could.

[00:01:25] SY: What about it made you feel like you could be happy doing it?

[00:01:29] ND: Well, during this period of time, there were some articles out. The one that I remember most predominantly was hand dryers, not recognizing darker skin. And I understood, I’m an ’80s baby, so I’ve seen the world move from like card catalogs to Google, and I understood that the impact that tech was having in the world around us, and that was a clear indication that there weren’t enough people like me in those rooms. So I wanted to show up in them.

[00:01:56] SY: And so when you were reading those articles, what came up for you?

[00:02:02] ND: It felt very much like I was watching every inequity that I and the people I come from had experienced, being baked into something that was very opaque and that my community couldn’t necessarily recognize in the same way that we were used to recognizing these things. So it was able to fly under the radar much more than the kind of overt things we see in our physical lives.

[00:02:27] SY: And when you thought about getting into tech, was it with this mission of writing some of those wrongs, or what was your goal? What was your intention when you thought about yourself getting into the industry?

[00:02:40] ND: I think there were a few things that I thought about. I was definitely first and foremost thinking about how I wanted to spend the next 20 years of my career. Did I want it to be doing something that I had lost passion for and didn’t feel like I was using the best of my talents in? Or did I want to take a leap into something new and really be challenged and really get opportunities to grow? So I was thinking about that. I was thinking again about the lack of diversity in tech, and I was also thinking about compensation. I knew that I would never be able to achieve the kind of compensation I can in software engineering that I could in retail management.

[00:03:22] SY: Tell me a little bit more about where you were in your life at this point? You mentioned that you were working in retail. What were you doing? What led you to that point?

[00:03:30] ND: So I was in retail management and I’d also just gotten married and I married into a wonderful family that was very different than the family that I came from. So my husband is a firefighter. He’s doing the thing that he dreamed about doing since he was a child.

[00:03:46] SY: How many of us get to say that? That’s fun.

[00:03:47] ND: Right. Right. Both his brother and his wife had very professional careers that they had intentionally chosen, and it opened up kind of a new existence for me. You hear that you can do anything, but I hadn’t seen that modeled in real life. I hadn’t seen people intentionally driving their careers to be something other than just a paycheck.

[00:04:11] SY: And what did that mean for you?

[00:04:12] ND: If you show me that a thing can be done, I have no doubt that I can do it. And once I saw that it could be done, I knew that the future was just a matter of me deciding what I wanted it to look like and moving forward.

[00:04:24] SY: So I know that at the time you mentioned you were working in retail management and you were studying fashion and apparel design.

[00:04:30] ND: Correct.

[00:04:31] SY: Very different from tech, using your hands in a totally different way. You’re dealing with materials and people and human bodies. It just feels like such a different world. What were your expectations going into fashion and apparel design?

[00:04:46] ND: To be honest, when I enrolled in that program, I was at a very chaotic period, time in my life, and I knew that I needed to do something if I wasn’t going to continue to live the way I was living. So it felt like an easy transition because I was a stylist, young lady, and that was something that innately kind of came to me. But it’s interesting that the thing that appealed to me most in that field was the technical aspect of it, the pattern drafting, the precision of measurements and things like that. So that’s what I was hoping to do long term, was to be a pattern drafter.

[00:05:27] SY: Pattern drafter. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of that profession. Is that the people who make the patterns? I assume that’s what that is.

[00:05:32] ND: It is.

[00:05:33] SY: Okay. Very, very cool. And what led you to decide to not pursue that anymore? What made you go away from that and into tech?

[00:05:42] ND: You know, life’s really hard and I was in a long-term relationship that went very poorly and it led me to pick up my life and move across the country to Oregon. And in that survival mode state that I was in, re-enrolling in school wasn’t my top priority. I was just trying to gather the pieces of my life. And I also got my first good paying retail management job around that time of my life. And it was just an easy progression to keep getting promoted and getting those pay bumps rather than going back to school.

[00:06:19] SY: And so you’re on this trajectory of continuing to move up the ladder and continuing in retail management. What was the thing that made you say, “You know what? I’m done with this, I’m done with this life, with this profession, I’m going to take that first step, not just think about it, but actually take that step to get into code”?

[00:06:37] ND: So when I was first interested in knowing what it might be like to be a software engineer, I reached out to a company that produced software tools. That sounded very interesting to me. I just sent them a blind email like, “Hey, I’m Natalie. This is some of my backstory. I’m wondering if you have any kind of mentorship programs.” And I actually got a response from the CEO of that company who was very impressed with what I had written, told me that he didn’t have a formal mentorship program, but he did have a software engineer, her name’s Brittany Braxton, who was a black woman who had went to a bootcamp and was now working as an engineer. And he offered to connect me to her. And when I met her for a coffee date, I just knew, like I’m looking at myself, she did it, I can do it, I’m going to do it.

[00:07:32] SY: Oh, that’s beautiful. I think that being able to see other people realize amazing dreams is such a great source of inspiration and empowerment for us. So it’s really great that you have this opportunity to see your future modeled for you.

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