I didn’t start coding because I wanted a tech career.
I started because I needed something to focus on that didn’t involve the ghosts of war.
Post-military life isn’t always a smooth ride. For me—and for many others—it came with anxiety, sleepless nights, a racing mind, and a deep sense of disconnection from the world I returned to.
I didn’t talk about it. Didn’t want to.
But silently, I was breaking apart.
Until I found programming.
You can be the smartest person in the room, but if no one trusts you, you’re not a leader.
I’ve seen leaders come and go—officers who had rank but no rapport, managers who gave orders without earning respect.
And I’ve learned one thing for sure:
Leadership isn’t about control. It’s about loyalty.
Not the “follow me blindly” kind.
The “I’ve got your back even when things go sideways” kind.
And that’s what real leadership—military or civilian—is built on.
Transitioning from the military to tech felt like parachuting into a whole new world.
Instead of weapons systems, I had programming languages.
Instead of chain of command, I had agile boards.
Instead of the barracks, I had GitHub repos.
But despite the culture shock, I soon realized something important:
Veterans are uniquely equipped to thrive in the tech industry—even if we don’t speak the language yet.
We’ve already learned the toughest parts: discipline, communication under pressure, and mission-first thinking.
You can’t fake loyalty.
You earn it. You prove it. And if you’re lucky, you’re surrounded by people who embody it.
I learned about leadership in a fire base—but I live it every day in my tech career. And the heart of it, then and now, is always the same:
Loyalty.
Real loyalty isn’t about following blindly. It’s about:
I’ve faced pressure in many forms—artillery missions under a blazing sun, late-night fire watches, and sleepless nights before deployment.
But I never expected that debugging JavaScript at 2 AM could feel just as intense.
There’s something about being stuck in code—tracing a logic bug that won’t quit, chasing a null value down a rabbit hole, or staring at a crashing app with no error in sight—that makes your pulse quicken. It’s not physical combat, but your brain treats it like one.
Breaking into tech after the military can feel like jumping into a foreign language.
New acronyms. New culture. New rules.
But the truth is, veterans have an edge—and most of us don’t realize it.
Here are 5 lessons I carried straight from the Army into my IT career that made all the difference.
Coding can get intense.
Hours fly by. Eyes burn. Deadlines loom. The debugger won’t cooperate. And right as I’m about to spiral into a loop of frustration…
I hear paws on hardwood.
A deep sigh.
And my Great Dane flops down at my feet like a furry anchor.
Suddenly, the code doesn’t feel so big anymore.
Let’s be honest: tech isn’t all cool gadgets and AI breakthroughs. It’s pressure. Problem-solving. Late nights and mind-numbing bugs.
You’re deep in a project. The system breaks. Nothing compiles. The app crashes. You’re on edge, checking every line like it might explode.
Sound familiar?
For me, debugging code feels a lot like clearing a minefield—and I say that as someone who trained for both.
Before we moved into unknown territory in the Army, we scouted. We looked for patterns. We tracked the safest paths. We didn’t just charge in—we thought first.
That’s exactly how I approach debugging.
No one tells you how weird it is to go from firing cannons to folding laundry at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday.
After my service as a 13B in the Army, the silence was deafening. I wasn’t chasing targets anymore. There were no missions. No comms. No fire support team to check in with.
And for a while, I felt like a soldier without a war.
The hardest part of leaving the military isn’t losing the uniform—it’s losing the mission.
I needed something bigger than myself. Something to work toward. Something to protect.
I used to load artillery rounds into a howitzer. Now I load functions into machine learning pipelines.
And strange as it sounds, artillery operations taught me more about writing clean code than any tutorial ever could.
Because both require the same thing: discipline.
In the military, we drilled everything:
Same steps. Every time. No shortcuts.
When I first heard “machine learning,” I pictured some sci-fi robot uprising.
Turns out, it’s less Terminator, more intel analyst on steroids.
If you’re a veteran trying to understand what machine learning really is, think of it like recon—but with data instead of drones.
At its core, ML is about teaching machines to recognize patterns, make decisions, and learn from experience—just like we did during fire missions.
When you’ve been trained to make decisions under fire, tech feels… calm.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Tech teams hit roadblocks. They deal with pressure, deadlines, and breakdowns—just like any unit in the field.
And that’s exactly why I believe the military mindset belongs in tech.
In the Army, the mission came first. Always.
That same mentality helps in the digital world. I don’t care who wrote the broken code—I care how we fix it together.
