In this video I share how I became a software engineer with virtually no experience—no internships, no degree in IT, no bootcamp. I’m Andy, I’m 27, living in Melbourne, and I’ve been working full-time as a software engineer for the past 3 years. I studied a double degree in mechanical engineering and biomedicine, tried a grad mech engineering job, and within a month I knew it wasn’t for me. I was genuinely having a quarter-life crisis and my mental health took a serious nose dive, so I knew I had to pivot. What worked for me was applying for Australian graduate programs that had tech streams, because a lot of companies care more about soft skills than hard skills when you’re fresh out of uni. I chose a company with a 2-year program and did four rotations: business analyst first (to ease in), then front-end (Git/GitHub, React, TypeScript), then back-end (C#/.NET building APIs and algorithms), then front-end again on a customer-facing site with huge traffic. My biggest takeaway is to keep it real: software engineering is a lot of hours, a lot of debugging, and it’s often glorified online. But if you’ve got curiosity, communication, and you actually like problem solving, your background doesn’t have to define your potential—especially if you can get into a program that lets you try different roles.