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Are your skills out of date, and how Rachel transferred her old skills into new roles (33:33)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)

⭐️ Leave a Review

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a 5-star review here and tell us who you want to see on the next podcast.
You can also Tweet Alex from Scrimba at @bookercodes and tell them what lessons you learned from the episode so that he can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 Or tell Jan he's butchered your name here.

A Cabinet Secretary, a Senator, and a Governor Walk Into a Library...