Welcome to the Coden to be podcast. We talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I'm your host, Ron, and today we're talking about how being demoted could be the right career move with Christina Lustig, software developer at Stack Overflow. I would get so lost that I just wouldn't code for like a week after that.

I would get so discouraged.

And I just genuinely thought that it wasn't for me and it was just destined to be a hobby.

Christina talks about transitioning from being director of design to an associate software developer,

the different factors that went into

making that decision, and whether she would do her journey differently if she had the chance,

after this.

The road stretches before you, but there's trouble ahead, stationary cars.

You're faced with the McDonald's side mission.

Do you, A, join the ever-growing queue, or B, take the next exit and treat yourself to a glorious Mackey's.

Detouring to McDonald's.

Start your side mission today.

Thanks so much for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So you wrote a really great piece in 2021 titled, I Followed My Dreams and Got Demoted to Software Developer.

Can you talk a bit about your career background and what led you to transitioning into a career as a developer? I started off

studying linguistics in undergrad and after that worked in tech support for a little bit. Working in

tech support, I discovered that UX is a passion of mine, largely because the

place that I worked, their UX, left something to be desired.

And so I started a grad program at Carnegie Mellon in Human Computer Interaction.

And in the course of doing that grad program, I took just one programming

class, a very introductory one, and liked it, but kind of filed it away. Like, this is fun,

...