Joe Zhou left his finance role at Uber to become the seventh iOS engineer on Uber Eats. Two and a half years into his engineering career, Joe reflects on his journey and offers advice for others considering taking the plunge into programming.

Prior to joining Uber, I had never considered becoming a professional engineer. I studied finance in college. I interned at an investment bank and then in corporate finance at a tech company. When I did start working as a financial analyst post-college, I quickly became the Excel nerd, ninja, and wizard of every office.

Eventually, my finance career led me to Uber. Work was a whirlwind rush that threw me into accounting, new business launches, financial systems, fundraising, budgeting, and strategic planning. Like many newly-hired analysts, I learned SQL to run my own queries: it gave me a taste of writing code.

After two years, I felt like I was stagnating. I craved the feeling I felt early in my career—the feeling of being on an extremely steep learning curve, pushed by both necessity and passion every day. To me, engineering sounded like the steepest of curves.

In my opinion, engineering gives you the power to drive massive impact. An Uber engineer that writes a new feature could save each user ten seconds every time they use their app. This small change adds up to hundreds of years saved every year for riders, drivers, and eaters.

If you’ve never written a single line of code, try this:

• On a PC, click the Command Prompt item in the Start Menu under Windows System, and paste: Echo Hello world
• On a Mac, open the Terminal application and paste: printf “Hello worldn”

You just executed a line of code! Software is just lines of code that make computers do things. To me, what’s even better is building software that makes other people’s computers do something useful. What is best of all is building a tool that delivers value to millions of people. A feeling of absolute bliss for me comes from building products that are useful and beautiful.

Level setting

After I decided to transition to programming, I felt that I already had the equivalent of a coding bootcamp in terms of preparedness for a full-time engineering job. I was lucky; I went into my engineering interview at Uber with:

• One college intro computer science course.
• Eight years of finance experience. This included the proverbial 10,000 hours of Excel.
• One time in middle school I built a web page. (Didn’t we all? #