Entering IT After 30? A Real Story Without Rose-Colored Glasses

Everything was quite prosaic and familiar to many women: you go on maternity leave, having a job, a good position and prospects, and upon return — your place is taken by another person and you no longer have your responsibilities. Dead end.

📍 How the Corporation "Gifted" Me Python

That's exactly what happened to me. After 3 years of work, I remained as a replacement worker — I was given any work just to keep me somewhat busy and nominally involved. And, accordingly, they waited for me to submit my resignation myself.

Thus, on me — then a marketer — fell work with hundreds of thousands of rows in Google spreadsheets, which I had to sort manually or through formulas. Several times I really did this manually, and then I started looking for ways to optimize — I didn't want to spend 60 hours of work time on monotonous tasks.

First, I started learning automation in Google Sheets, but it still wasn't right for such a volume of data. And I met Python.

📍 First Code in Notepad (Yes, Without IDE)

After a few weeks of trial and error, I wrote my first code — in a regular notepad — because I didn't know then what an IDE was. And it worked! I no longer spent 60 hours a month on manual work.

Honestly, I got hooked, and I started googling what else could be done with Python.

📍 Coursera, Resumes, and First Pet Project

Then I came across the Python for Everybody from University of Michigan course on Coursera. It's a 5-course specialization that covers Python basics, data structures, working with databases, web scraping, and APIs. I completed all the courses just for myself — to simplify my work and understand what's even possible to do with code.

After the course, I tried to write my first simple Telegram bot, discovered GitHub, and wrote a post about it on Threads. And I got unexpected feedback — many experienced developers started helping me and guiding me.

The best advice I got then: "Don't wait for orders, write pet projects." They explained to me that clients want to see your code, your GitHub, your real projects. So my first bot was made for a real need — accepting payments from clients for my marketing services. It was a full-fledged pet project that solved my problem and simultaneously became a case study for my portfolio.

In parallel, I started sending resumes for junior positions. Dozens, hundreds of forms. Not a single response. It was psychologically difficult — you invest time, effort, and get silence in response. So I decided not to wait for permission from HR and started the freelancer path.

After a few months, I had my first order for $100 for a TG bot. Then I decided that I wanted to continue in programming, because it came extraordinarily easily and quickly to me, even considering that I had 2 children and studied when they were asleep.

By the way, yes — all my initial learning took place at night while the children were sleeping. Every day I watched a new lecture, and before starting a new work day, I tried to apply the knowledge — write at least a little code to see how it works. The moment when you run code and it works — incomparable to anything.

📍 Dismissal as a Point of No Return

A turning point came — I was fired. Fired precisely because the work that I had to do over a month was now done by my code in a few hours.

I then wrote about it on social media and received quite a lot of comments advising me not to go into IT because these are extremely difficult times and it's very hard to find work. But that didn't convince me, and I had experience behind me in marketing and sales, so I know how to sell myself, so to speak.

The first months were indeed super difficult — I was still actively learning, writing TG bots on order, and it was really hard. I even started looking for work in marketing again, but then I stumbled upon the Women in Tech community and read stories of women who changed their lives. This inspired me tremendously.

I closed my eyes to all the mockery I heard addressed to me about age (I'm 37), about gender — "a woman and code, ha ha", about difficult times — and just started doing what I thought was right.

📍 A Year Later: What We Have

Now, a year after I made my first commit, you're reading this article on my agency's website LazySoft. And I want to tell everyone: even if it's difficult, even if they say you don't need it — you can do everything. If a mother of two children after maternity leave could do it, so can you.