The Netherlands: My Journey to Becoming an Expat Software Developer

My first full day in Amsterdam I find myself at a coffee shop waiting for my co-workers to end their workday so we can travel to Hungary on a two day company retreat. At 32 years old, looking back at how I got here is a long, fun and frustrating journey.

My roommate in college had majored in web development. When we moved to Boston after graduation in 2008, she got a high paying job right away at a really cool company. My own post college life actually looked pretty good on paper. I took a job unrelated to my field of study that didn’t even require a degree, but it was interesting nonetheless. On paper, I was making decent money, enough to travel internationally a few times in my mid twenties. I worked for a good company, I could afford to go out to eat and drink every weekend, I spent money on Amazon when I was bored and I was paying off my student debt slowly but surely. After years of the same thing over and over, the reality was that even though it looked good on paper, it wasn’t really what I wanted and I never felt truly fulfilled by any of it.

The next thing I knew, eight years had gone by. Had I advanced my career at all? Yes, kind of. I had taken different roles over the years and had different responsibilities and received raises. I was still having fun, I was still spending money on food and drink and travel and paying off those bills. I think a lot of people in my generation have that moment when they know they’ve been fairly unhappy for quite some time, but there’s nothing exactly to point at as the cause, there’s nothing specific to complain about, it’s just there, like a permanent rain cloud. And one day we wake up and we just snap. We just can’t do it anymore. That happened to me a little over two years ago. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just that I was unhappy, I loathed my job and going to work. I had been able to get excited about various things about my job in the past, but after that day, it was impossible. I knew that after many years, there wasn’t much left for me to work for at my job. No other roles or responsibilities excited me. So I quit my job, bought a car and drove out to Colorado, where I had a small network of friends and more opportunities awaited.

While the move was exiting, I ended up working as a legal assistant at a law firm for a small period of time where I immediately felt the same weight I had at my last job. It wasn’t exciting me and it wasn’t something I looked forward to doing every day. I didn’t want to waste any more time at a job I knew wasn’t going to be for me in the long run. A co-worker from Boston had actually quit his job and attend a coding school to learn back-end development. After the program he ended up staying to teach there, which is how I heard about the Turing School of Software and Design in Denver. Turing had just started a front-end program and I decided to be impulsive again and give it a go. The front-end appealed to me more because I felt like learning JavaScript in a controlled environment was a good idea and I also liked that front-end development still required a lot of thought around the end user and user interactions.

I’m not going to go into detail about what it was like at Turing. It was a lot of work and a lot of late nights. If you want to see grown adults cry on a consistent basis, spend some time at Turing. But as expected, I made a lot of good friends and we made a lot of cool projects. I started Turing in August of 2016 with no coding experience and in September of 2017, I accepted my first job as a front-end developer at WeTransfer in Amsterdam.

I had never been to Amsterdam before. It was weird to get on a plane and go somewhere foreign knowing that I wasn’t coming back. Luckily, everyone I know who’s been here said it was their favorite European city, which is why I’m less nervous that I would be otherwise. I’m excited about the work I’m going to be doing, the changes and goals my team is going work towards and I’m obviously very excited to meet new people and explore a new city. While I’m sure roles and responsibilities will change as I grow as a developer, I’m excited that I’m finally in an industry doing work that I enjoy and will be able to do for a long time.