From accountant to developer: my career change into tech (and what came after)

Even though it’s been a few years now, I still vividly remember the reasons and feelings that led me to rethink my professional life. It was a mix of monotony, lack of challenge and creativity, no sense of progress. My job required no effort whatsoever — neither physical nor intellectual — and that, for me, was too heavy a weight to carry.

This is the story of my career change into tech: a rollercoaster that started with a spreadsheet and, almost six years later, has brought me here. If you’re at that turning point — or you’ve already crossed it and are still processing what happened — this one’s for you.

Spreadsheets, accounting, and the decision to jump

After finishing my business degree, I spent a few years working in finance departments. Spreadsheets, accounting, cashflow, numbers everywhere. I’m not saying that kind of work isn’t a good job — it just wasn’t for me.

Since we have to spend a large part of our lives working, let’s at least try to make it something interesting, motivating, something that gives back to us personally — something we can actually enjoy rather than dread. It sounds obvious, but obvious things have a way of going unnoticed.

Recognising, accepting and digesting all of that wasn’t easy. It meant, first of all, admitting that I’d chosen the wrong career path. And second, throwing away everything I’d studied and done up to that point to pursue something entirely different.

Over time, I’ve realised that reading was wrong: everything you learn and do adds up. It becomes experience that can serve you well in other areas. The analytical thinking I developed working with numbers, the attention to detail, the business perspective — all of that is still with me today when I write code.

I found myself at a crossroads with two paths ahead: the familiar one, comfortable, smooth, but seemingly going nowhere; and a new one, with more twists and ups and downs, that looked more exciting and promised to take me to new places. Despite not being much of an adventurous person, the choice was clear: I took the detour to see where it would lead.

Since we have to spend a large part of our lives working, let’s at least try to make it something we can enjoy rather than dread.

ARTURO G. BRUNO
Software Engineer

The rollercoaster of a career change into tech: from vertigo to impostor syndrome

At first, while I was training to become a web developer, everything was new and exciting. My daily routine changed completely — I went back to studying, put things into practice, met new and interesting people. I had challenges ahead of me that made me research, think, and find solutions. And that, coming from where I was coming from, was thrilling. It also helped me face the fear of change and understand that change, however uncomfortable it may be, is what allows us to move forward.

But the process wasn’t free from doubt and uncertainty. Questions like “what if I’ve made a huge mistake?”, “will I be good enough?”, “what if, after all this, I can’t find a job?”. I’d say it’s perfectly normal to have these thoughts in situations like this. But it’s also true that nothing ventured, nothing gained. It’s better to try, even if things don’t go the way you want, than to regret never having tried at all.

And when the moment of truth finally came, it was time to make the jump into the job market. A genuinely terrifying leap: interviews in unfamiliar territory, the first “thanks, but no” responses. But at that point you can only move forward — you haven’t come this far to give up. And I made it. After several interviews, which are themselves a learning process, I got what I’d been chasing for over two years since I decided to take that detour.

The biggest challenge, though, wasn’t technical. It was fighting impostor syndrome — something common among those of us who’ve switched careers. It’s an unpleasant feeling that makes you think you’re not cut out for this, that you’re not prepared enough, that you lack experience. In my case it comes and goes: sometimes I manage to keep it at bay, other times not so much. But you learn to manage it and trust that, little by little, it will fade.

Comfort as the enemy: spotting stagnation before it catches you

I wanted challenges, no monotony, having to think and find solutions. And I certainly found that. In this profession, every day brings a different problem to solve and change comes as standard. It’s the opposite of my previous career. It gives you more and demands more. But if you enjoy learning, the balance is positive.

However, after nearly three years on the same project at a previous company, I started feeling stuck, burnt out, lacking challenges, growth and motivation. The situation reminded me, in a way, of my old self at the accounting job. But this time I had an advantage: I already knew that feeling, I was clear it wasn’t what I wanted, and I knew I had to act.

Not everyone understood it, because on the surface everything looked fine: comfortable, calm, everything under control. That’s the trap. Stagnation doesn’t arrive as a sudden block — it arrives disguised as stability. And comfort can become your worst enemy when it makes you believe everything is fine.

What I learned from that experience:

• Stagnation doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It means you’ve exhausted the learning available in that context.
• Comfort and growth rarely coexist. Not because comfort is bad, but because genuine growth requires a degree of discomfort.
• Acting is more important than having certainty. We rarely have complete information, so learning to make decisions with what we have is an important skill. On this occasion, I decided to close that chapter.

What nobody tells you is that impostor syndrome doesn’t disappear with years of experience. What changes is your relationship with it: you stop believing it blindly.

ARTURO G. BRUNO
Software Engineer

You have to go through difficulties to get where you want

But things don’t always go as expected. After deciding to leave, I moved to a different company. It didn’t take long to realise it wasn’t my place. For reasons that aren’t relevant here, I couldn’t find my footing, and I had to fight hard to keep going. Even though things didn’t look great, I wasn’t willing to give up.

Sometimes you have to push through difficulties and overcome obstacles along the way to reach where you truly want to be. And that’s exactly what happened. Some time later, I had the opportunity to join Orbitant. I arrived with the advantage of knowing some of the people who were already there — we’d worked together at a previous company — so I had a good sense of how things would be. This time, the leap was much easier.

What I found at Orbitant was a team where difficult questions have space. Where technology isn’t an end in itself but a way of solving real problems for real people. And where the culture isn’t written on a poster on the wall — you can feel it in the day-to-day: in how decisions are made, in how knowledge is shared, and in how setbacks are handled.

The second career change: building software in the age of AI

And here comes the twist I didn’t expect. When I decided to leave accounting for web development, I thought the career change would be a one-off event. A before and after. What I didn’t imagine was that, just a few years later, the industry itself would ask something similar of me: to reinvent myself again, but this time without changing seats.

The arrival of generative AI has changed everything. And I don’t mean that as a LinkedIn headline — I mean it as someone living it day to day. The tools I work with today didn’t exist two years ago. Copilots, code agents, models that analyse, suggest and generate solutions alongside you — all of this has gone from novelty to being part of the actual workflow.

What’s happening is a paradigm shift. The developer’s role is no longer just about writing code line by line. Increasingly, it’s about directing, evaluating and correcting the output of intelligent tools. About breaking complex problems into pieces the right size for an agent to solve. About knowing when the result an AI gives you looks correct but isn’t. About maintaining architectural coherence when part of the code has been generated by a machine. We’re moving from executing tasks to orchestrating systems that execute them for us.

What accounting taught me (without me knowing) about working with AI

It turns out the baggage I brought from my previous life — the stuff I thought I’d left behind years ago — is now more valuable than ever. Analytical thinking, understanding business processes, the habit of verifying data before taking it at face value, the ability to spot when a number doesn’t add up even though it “looks” right. All of that, which I developed among spreadsheets and balance sheets, is exactly what you need when working with an AI that generates convincing but not always accurate answers.

Understanding requirements, thinking in a structured way, questioning results — these skills are more important than ever in an environment where technology moves faster than our ability to evaluate it. And they’re not exclusively technical skills. They’re skills an accountant or anyone accustomed to analysing, verifying and deciding with imperfect information can have.

The environment matters as much as the attitude

Now, facing a change of this magnitude alone is very different from facing it within a team that has it built into the way they work. At Orbitant, the position is clear: AI accelerates, but experience leads.

It’s not about chasing every new tool or trend that appears, but about applying technology when it genuinely delivers results. Building clean, scalable and maintainable solutions — and using AI as an accelerator within that framework, not as a shortcut that replaces it.

In practice, that means when someone on the team tries a new AI tool and discovers it generates code that looks clean but hides technical debt, they share it. And when someone else finds a way to use it that genuinely saves time without sacrificing quality, they share that too.

No dogma, no hype — shared judgement. And for someone like me — who changed careers looking for challenges and growth — that kind of environment isn’t a minor detail. It’s the difference between experiencing this paradigm shift with anxiety or experiencing it for what it really is: an opportunity to keep learning.

A future that looks like another career change

Given how much and how fast the world of software development is changing, it would be bold to predict exactly what the future will look like in five years. What we do know today is that things that seemed like science fiction not long ago are now a reality and part of daily life for many of us: AI agents are no longer simple assistants that complete lines of code — they’re collaborators that automate tasks, run tests, catch bugs and propose refactors, among other things.

What does that mean for a developer? That value doesn’t lie in how many lines of code you write, but in your ability to:

1. Define the problem well before asking an agent to solve it.
2. Critically evaluate what the AI generates — because looking correct doesn’t mean it is.
3. Maintain the big picture when you have multiple agents working in parallel.
4. Understand the business behind the software, not just the technical implementation.

And that, curiously, brings me back to the starting point. Because those skills — understanding the problem, verifying results, having business perspective — are the same ones I’ve been building throughout this entire journey. From spreadsheets to here.

Almost six years after taking that detour, the rollercoaster hasn’t ended. But I no longer mind not knowing where the next stretch is. What I am clear about is something I’ve always kept in mind: the importance of being in the right place, at the right time. It doesn’t always depend on you — you also need a bit of luck. But if you’re clear about where you want to be and know the direction you need to head in, you’re more likely to get there.

Every turn, so far, has taken me somewhere worth being. And this new turn — AI, learning to work in a way that didn’t exist two years ago — looks like it might be the most interesting one yet.