❤️‍🩹 'Healing my burned-out self'

Leaping over the waterfall from journalism to tech

Jan 06, 2025

Happy New Year, navigators! I’ve taken down my radically honest OOO message and am excited to dig in to some truly fantastic conversations on career transitions to kick off 2025.

First up, Career River Supporting Subscribers are invited to join me on Jan. 27 for a chat and Q&A on “leaping the waterfall” with Marita Pérez Díaz (registration link is at the bottom of this post). I know many of us will relate to the problem she was trying to solve when working in journalism:

“Being overworked and underpaid, I kept looking for a way to fulfill my vocation of serving my community and the need of healing my already burned-out self.”

To help us prep for our conversation, Marita has generously shared more about her transition from working in a newsroom through a stint in marketing up to her current role as a web engineer at the American Press Institute. Some elements I’m particularly interested in exploring when we talk are:

What helped you find and keep the courage to take your career in a new direction?
How did you know tech was the right area for you to explore next?
What’s the worst advice you got and how did you respond?
What did you learn from this experience that you want to share with others?

Read on to learn more about Marita’s leap over the waterfall, and I hope you can join our conversation later this month.

What was your pivot moment? How did you transition from journalism to tech?

During the pandemic, I found myself doing at least 5 different roles in our small team. Despite being grateful for the opportunities to do journalism for the Cuban-American community and for being trusted to experiment with different tools, I was burned out and my mental health and emotional wellbeing were as poor as my income. That first decision of leaving journalism was as difficult as a divorce for me, as I felt like a failure for not being able to stay in the field, being my vocation to be a journalist since my childhood.

The transition to marketing was not that hard, as I was still producing and creating content, working with social media, etc. However, the change in values in my environment (plastic surgery industry) crushed my soul even more, despite the better pay. I was crying every day while driving to a toxic, sexist and superficial work environment with zero intellectual stimulation. I only lasted a bit more than a year.

That’s when my river bifurcated into two paths; one was the predictable and shallow waters of the marketing I was doing, with not enough current to keep moving forward. The other one was rapid waters that converted into a giant waterfall, with no clear certainty of better waters ahead, only with hopes of a more beautiful river on the other side.

As an immigrant with family in Cuba, I didn’t even have at that moment three months worth of savings to go study full time, and my main safety net was my loving boyfriend, who believed in me even more than myself. He was the one that threw me a life jacket when I was swimming directly to the huge waterfall of a career change from journalism/communication to software engineer.

What was the hardest part of that “waterfall jump”?

The identity crisis that followed during job hunting for a developer role. Who was I? A journalist, a programmer, a programmer-journalist? How do I tell my own career story, especially when my two professions were so different?

When I was studying in the coding bootcamp, I had a relative that, being a programmer himself, said to me about my career change: “You are so crazy!”. After graduating, and looking again for advice for my resume, his answer was to eliminate anything related to journalism, as “none would hire a software engineer without a computer science background”.

That experience with extended family certainly triggered even more my identity struggle; was I supposed to erase a decade of my work life? Why would I even do that to pretend to be someone I am not so I could fit the “conventional” programmer role? All of that in the context of massive tech layoff and the job market crisis of 2022.

By the other hand, I was fortunate enough to receive wise advice from my bootcamp career success manager, who insisted on building confidence, always telling me that my journalism background was exactly what made me a unique programmer, with added skills that a traditional coding career path would not be able to offer.

That was the path I chose; I am a programmer with a journalism background, and right now I am fortunate enough to work as a web engineer for API, right at the intersection of journalism and technology.

Are there any ways the career river frame helped you to better tell your career story?

This frame definitely helped me to ease the struggle of thinking of myself as a failure for not continuing my first career. I am seeing it now more clearly; it’s my values of perseverance, love for learning and empathy that really dictates my career journey, forcing me to swim away or even jump a high waterfall when my occupation doesn’t align with those values.

What would you say to other people navigating their own rivers right now?

That even when our rivers could be different, we are not navigating alone. It is ok to ask for help from those around us with better boats and navigation systems. And if one day you need to choose between the boring and sad shallow waters or the beautiful (yet scary) waterfalls, get a life jacket from your fellow sailors if you can and don’t hesitate to jump. You may be surprised by how beautiful and interesting the new river is once you get afloat again. Also, don’t forget to throw a life jacket as well and give back to those navigating after you.

Here’s more on Marita’s journey and advice: