What was your journey like transitioning into the tech industry?

I have a weird career story actually. My first job (that I wasn't fired from in a matter of weeks) was at a local IT services company. I was 14, so I only worked there for a summer. The next summer I worked at a different IT services company in the area, a little bigger, that provided managed network services to high schools and local governments. I then took the next two summers off to be a teenager.

After graduating high school, I studied Information Security at a local university. In my first two semesters there, I worked as a junior SOC analyst on the security team. The following summer, I worked as a .NET developer at Herman Miller. It was during this job that I came to a sobering realization... I was awkward as hell! Knowing that, I decided it would be a good idea to bartend for the remaining 3 years of college. I worked my way up to head bartender at a local restaurant before I began my internship at another IT services company, this time working remotely.

After finishing my internship and graduating from university, I did some contract work for local nonprofits (primarily full-stack development, with some cyber security consulting). As I brought a nonprofit ML development project to a close, I was contacted by Tanium the tech startup I work for now. The recruiter initially thought I would be a good fit for the TAM role, but I eventually landed in the professional services team.

Been working here two years now and it has been great! Definitely not the normal way into tech, but in my experience the better engineers always have the weirdest backgrounds.