Meet Rachel Lee Nabors 🇺🇸🇬🇧! They are an award-winning cartoonist who transitioned to become a developer with a passion for teaching the world how to code. Rachel has worked at major tech companies such as Microsoft, AWS, and Meta. At Meta, they were a pivotal contributor to react.dev, the award-winning version of React documentation.
Rachel is also the author of the Tech Career Survival Guide, a series of Substack essays that may or may not become a book. In these essays, they teach readers about emotional resilience, managing change, and the practical aspects of working in tech. In this episode, Rachel will share their secret for landing high-profile tech jobs, as well as advice for owning your non-linear career path, especially if you're a career changer. You will also discover how to deal with a job market where opportunities may seem scarce and what you can do if nobody seems to be hiring. Plus: why you shouldn't email Dan Abramov, who to reach out to instead, and why collecting feedback from people directly is often better than staring at analytics.
🔗 Connect with Rachel
⏰ Timestamps
- How Rachel became a developer while being a cartoonist (01:29)
- How Rachel handled the career shift into professional development (03:08)
- Code can make things come to life (05:48)
- Very few people are given jobs just because they're popular (09:22)
- Break (11:07)
- How Rachel gets her FAANG roles (12:28)
- What to do if nobody's hiring (14:48)
- How can a new developer create value in the community? (16:28)
- How Alex did the same (18:41)
- Great Recession was tough, but it brought up some great engineering (21:17)
- Increase your chance to get lucky later (25:43)
- What to do if you don't have a linear career path (27:38)
- When changing career paths, it can feel like starting from scratch (31:26)
- Developing expertise is not a good thing! (32:14)
- Are your skills out of date, and how Rachel transferred her old skills into new roles (33:33)
- Barista engineering (36:52)
- Don't be ashamed of your previous work experience, however unrelated (38:40)
- How Rachel adjusts to change and challenges and helps others do the same through The Tech Career Survival Guide (40:56)
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