Rami left consulting burnout for code—and learned how many job searches one move can contain

Rami’s Japan chapter looks prestigious until you hear the sleep schedule. A sociology graduate, she joined IBM as a consultant for a bit over three years—requirements work, multi-vendor program management on large builds, even new-business strategy—almost never writing code. Project lengths swung from a few months to nearly a year; leaving on time felt like luck. The assignment that broke the pattern meant weekly all-nighters, taxi-home showers, and once falling asleep while she was supposed to be the junior taking minutes before a client session. Seniors could still sparkle at dawn; she could not. Overseas living by thirty had been a soft wish about English conversation; that project turned it into an exit.

Canada meant college and a full identity swap into development without a coding past. The interview is valuable precisely because it refuses a single-offer myth. An early search resolved in about two months—fast beside classmates who needed three, four, even six or seven months, some paying to extend enrollment so co-op hours would still count before a course end date. Another process reached finals. Then a layoff arrived, and she underestimated the sequel—taking roughly a month to tinker with machine learning and see friends before realizing the market would not politely hurry for someone who had “already succeeded once.”

The third search stretched another couple of months until savings nearly ran out. A tax refund covering about a month of living costs arrived at the exact wrong-right moment; without it she imagines either a sudden return or calling parents in tears. She tracks applications in a spreadsheet: on the order of forty-four sends before the first role, then around eighty in the post-layoff push. Phone screens were the scarce resource. She learned to ask rejected teams for feedback and to treat volume as rehearsal.

What she wants readers to feel is not polished destiny but the gap between how cheerful she can sound and how close the edges were—visa clocks, empty months, the humility of starting technical life after strategic titles. Only after surviving those edges does the punchline land honestly: right now, working as a developer feels genuinely enjoyable.

She is careful not to turn pain into performance. The interview exists, she suggests, so the next person underestimates fewer cycles—first hire, almost-offer, layoff, third hunt—and budgets courage accordingly. Enjoyment on the job is the earned ending, not the premise she started with when consulting nights erased sleep.

Along the way she names the ordinary tactics that accumulate: spreadsheets of applications, asking for feedback after rejects, refusing to treat a first Canadian title as permanent armor against layoffs. The smile people remember from her Frog writing years coexists with those tactics. Fun at work, finally, is what makes the earlier all-nighters look like a door rather than a personality.