Heather Barney: Learning that I belong in the industry

Today we’ll meet Heather, an Associate Software Engineer at Carrot Fertility. Heather had a 15+ year career as a collegiate rowing coach before she switched career paths and joined a coding bootcamp. Here’s Heather's journey to growing her confidence and skillset at Formation and landing her first SWE role.

What was your educational and/or professional background prior to joining Formation?
Before making the transition into software engineering, I had a fifteen-year career as an intercollegiate rowing coach. It was rewarding work, but coaching is a job that dictates a particular lifestyle, and the pandemic and some shifts in my personal life made it increasingly difficult for me to imagine myself continuing on that path through retirement.

I’d done some coding in school and always had it in the back of my mind as a possible “Plan B”. I began learning JavaScript through self-paced online resources and eventually decided that I was serious enough to formalize my training. I spent nine months in a part-time remote bootcamp learning React, Redux, Node, Express, SQL, etc., and building several solo and team-based portfolio projects.

During my bootcamp experience, I stumbled on a part-time opportunity with a small company called Boathouse Connect that makes SaaS products specifically for the rowing community, so my coaching experience ended up being a big “in” for me there. I was fortunate to be able to contribute to a much larger production codebase than I’d gotten to work on in my bootcamp.

What originally got you interested in engineering?
I’ve enjoyed coding since I was a kid! I remember using a language called “Logo” on the Apple 2Es in my elementary school to make a turtle icon move around the screen. In my teen years, my parents had a non-networked Commodore 128 in our family room that was mostly used for word processing and video games, but I read enough of the manual to start teaching myself BASIC and would spend hours playing around with that.

In college I took the first few courses toward a CS major, gaining an introduction to Java and C, and have fond memories of afternoons in the basement of the science building feeling totally immersed in our weekly lab assignments. My parents, though, were not tech-forward at all and they couldn’t imagine what my future would look like, so they kind of talked me out of finishing the major.

Can you paint a picture of what you were looking for before you joined the Fellowship?
I had dipped my toe into the job-hunting pool a bit after finishing my bootcamp, but I’d found the interview process incredibly overwhelming. When I would get into technical interviews, I felt like I was in over my head. I’d freeze up and find myself unable to show what I knew, which shattered my confidence.

I’d been told to expect to bomb my first few interviews, but the general advice had been largely just to iterate and improve on my own. That felt hard for me, though, because those first few experiences left me feeling like I didn’t even know what I didn’t know! I was looking for structure in my learning process. I wanted specific guidance on what I needed to know to be successful and where my individual gaps were. I wanted to have a clear path to address those so that I could go into interviews feeling more prepared. And, ultimately, I wanted to expand my knowledge, improve my confidence, and land my first full-time role.

What made you want to up-level your career?
While I loved the part-time work I was doing with Boathouse Connect, I was eager to land my first full-time role! Financial reasons played in for sure, but I also wanted the opportunity to work at a greater scale and to be in a more team-based environment. I also wanted to accelerate my learning to launch me toward a successful career in my new field.

How did you find Formation?
Formation was first mentioned to me when I was finishing up my bootcamp, by a cohort mate who’d already applied. At the time I thought he was incredibly hardcore to be headed right into another program! I thought I was going to jump right into the job market, so that didn’t seem like the right path for me.

When I had some rough interview experiences a few months later, though, I stumbled upon a reference to Formation while searching for DSA resources, and the name rang a bell, so I looked into it further. I was excited about what I saw on the website and had good conversations with both the Formation team and my cohort mate who’d originally mentioned it.

Some things that were appealing to me as I was considering the opportunity were the personalized curriculum, the ongoing hiring support right up until I signed an offer, and the opportunity to work with senior engineers from well-known companies who could help me better understand industry best practices.

What was your specific goal in becoming a Fellow?
To get my first full-time role! But also, to build my knowledge, skill set, and confidence so that I could head into that first role feeling like I belonged in the industry and would be able to contribute.

How did you work with the Mentors?
Group sessions with Mentors were incredibly helpful in a few ways. One big one was getting very direct and immediate feedback on the quality of both my code and my technical communication. Self-directed platforms like Leetcode can determine if your code works or not, but having experienced engineers point out more subtle aspects that relate to how maintainable code would be in a large codebase was great learning that went a step beyond that.

Another important aspect for me as someone who can suffer from imposter syndrome was just getting to know the Mentors as people. They’re very smart, insightful, and experienced engineers. But working with them directly helped me to see that they’re also human, which helped me feel less intimidated going into interviews. They were great about sharing relatable stories from their own interviewing experiences, and they were all incredibly supportive and invested in our growth, which helped me feel more confident that I belonged in the industry, too.

What did you think of the tech platform?
I found the platform to be really helpful. It was very easy to access sessions, communicate with the community, and utilize a wide variety of resources around all sorts of topics. At times I did need to work with my Fellow Managers to ensure that I was using it in a way that was working for me, but they were always very accessible and helpful with that. I appreciated the way that I was able to schedule my tasks for the week.

One thing that was impressive to me was the way that the Formation engineers were constantly iterating on the platform and offering new features, frequently at the request of Fellows. So things like the ability to sign yourself up for live sessions or to assign yourself tasks that you thought would be helpful were nice additions during the time that I was in the Fellowship!

How did you measure your progress/success through the program?
I think this evolved a bit over time. When I started the program, I was probably a little too focused on meeting time limits, passing benchmarks, and meeting the timeline goals that had been laid out when my individual program was first developed. The timeline and time suggestions are helpful and motivating, but over time I realized that it was less important that I met these metrics and more important that I understood the material for each algo and challenge in a way that would enable me to be successful in an interview.

How did your interview skills improve with your Formation training?
So much!!! Mock interviews felt intimidating at first, but it was incredible to get feedback and advice from engineers who actually administer interviews at FAANG companies. For my first system design mock interview, I chose a Mentor who was particularly honest and held very high standards. When he gave me a passing mark, it was a HUGE confidence boost! In my pre-Formation interviews, I had some anxiety about whether I even deserved to be there; the mock interviews allowed me to go into “real” interviews relaxed and in a much more productive mindset that enabled me to demonstrate what I can do.

What was your actual job interview process like?
My interview loop for my current role involved an initial tech screen that was a live coding exercise, followed by a two-day virtual on-site with three different sessions - one focused on code review, one focused on fleshing out product requirements with a PM, and one focused on talking through my most significant technical accomplishment with an EM.

What was amazing about being at Formation while I was going through that process was that, for each of those different exercises, I was able to do a mock interview with a Mentor specifically targeted toward my upcoming interview, which gave me some great practice and insight. It helped me feel relaxed, confident, and like I knew what to expect as I went into my actual interviews.

How did Formation help you prepare for your new role?
The engineering culture at my company is very focused on collaboration and knowledge-sharing, which is part of what got me excited about the opportunity. While I’m still gaining my footing a bit, I know that my time at Formation working collaboratively with other Fellows and Mentors helped me find my voice and gain the skills and confidence to communicate more confidently and effectively.

What team are you on in your new role?
My team is responsible for the onboarding process for our members. Our domain is largely about members’ first experiences with our app, so making that process as delightful as possible is really important.

What is a current project you're working on in your new role?
Fertility journeys are often shared between couples, so for many of our members our product is relevant to them and their partner. My current project is around creating a way for our members’ partners to access information about that shared journey without needing to utilize the members’ login credentials.

“Quick-Fire”
First code you shipped?
My first PR for my new role was a ticket to improve logging for a recurring error that my team was dealing with repeatedly but struggling to fully understand and resolve. It was a small fix but has already helped the team out, and it was exciting to deploy code within my first week of onboarding!

Proudest moment?
Definitely the system design mock interview I mentioned earlier! Stan (the Mentor I referred to) has a reputation for being pretty tough. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t pass on my first try, but he told me afterward that he considered my performance to be solidly mid-level, bordering on senior-level! I had ZERO system design experience before starting that challenge and had learned a ton, so it was cool to see that in practice!

Biggest mistake?
Putting too much pressure on myself to pass certain assessments “on time”. For Algo Marathon, I went into my first try on my final challenge thinking I wouldn’t pass but ended up only three minutes over the time limit, which led me to think I’d pass on my next try. I did my second attempt right before taking a week off. I wanted to pass before taking time off, but I ended up making myself super anxious and didn’t finish in time. That felt tough at the time, but it was also really useful for me to have the opportunity to face some pressure in the middle of the program and learn how I work best in a situation like that so I’d be more prepared for the pressure that came with actual interviewing.

Favorite group session?
In retrospect, it was a session on dynamic programming. I was with a bunch of Fellows who had a lot more years of experience under their belts than I did and seemed to be grasping the material a lot more quickly than I was. I honestly felt pretty in over my head! In that session, I learned a ton and realized that on some previous algo tasks where I thought I’d been implementing DP, I actually hadn’t been. I was able to take that learning back to those problems and solve them much more elegantly. That feeling of being over my head was critical to helping me to actually understand the topic.

Biggest surprise about Formation?
I don’t know that I’d anticipated how much of my learning would be about mindset! While the technical instruction was really strong and helpful, I feel like my greatest growth area over my time at Formation was actually around improving my mindset and learning how to manage myself mentally and emotionally around taking risks and fear of failure.

Any advice you want to share?
The one thing I haven’t talked about yet is how great the FMs and other Formation support staff are! Especially during the job hunt phase, my FMs were critical resources who kept me motivated and made me feel like I wasn’t on this journey alone. So I guess my advice would be to take advantage of the community at Formation, as there are SO many amazing people who are invested in your success!