· 2 min read
From HVAC technician to code: my career change, unfiltered
From five years as an HVAC design engineer to development and business analysis: the real face of a career change, including the level to catch up and impostor syndrome.
- Career change
- Journey
Before I wrote code for a living, I was a design engineer in heating, ventilation and air conditioning, working in a design office. Five years sizing HVAC systems. Today I'm a developer and Business Analyst. In between, a career change. Not a whim: an old pull, and a switch that was anything but comfortable.
Computing, from the start
Contrary to the usual career-change story, there was no sudden spark. Computing always drew me in, since I was a kid. In the design office, I started writing small modules for the internal software (AutoLisp on AutoCAD, Excel/VBA macros), automating repetitive tasks, hacking together an internal site. Nobody asked me to. That's when I understood what actually excited me in the job: the software part. The rest followed.
The hard part: the level to catch up
Changing careers isn't starting from zero. It's starting from behind. When you enter development, some people have a ten-year head start: they coded as teenagers, went to school, stacked up projects. You catch up. A lot, fast, continuously. I started in QA, an honest way in where you touch everything and understand how a product holds together. Then backend, then full-stack, then design. Every step meant closing a gap.
And there's impostor syndrome, which never quite lets go. Even after several years, even with shipped projects, that small voice asking whether you're really legitimate. I stopped waiting for it to go quiet. I move forward with it.
What I'm not selling you
A career change is neither fast nor comfortable. People love the three-month bootcamp story with the doubled salary. The reality is evenings and weekends studying while you already have a job, a Bachelor done as an apprenticeship alongside client work, and moments where you wonder whether you made the right call. If you're looking for a shortcut, there isn't one. If you're looking to change careers for good, it costs time and effort.
What makes the difference
I don't have a recipe. But if I had to keep three things from what carried me through: be passionate, because curiosity holds you up when motivation fails; be serious, because shipping, testing and not cutting corners gets noticed faster than a diploma; and be determined, because the gap does close, but only if you don't quit. The rest, the tech and the frameworks, can be learned.
Verdict
People sometimes ask whether I regret the five years spent in HVAC. The question is framed wrong. Those years gave me an engineering rigor and a sense of analysis I reuse every day, in design as much as in code. The career change didn't erase my past. It recycled it. And maybe that's the real switch: to stop seeing your old job as a mistake, and to start putting it to work.