How Sarah went from teacher to software developer in 9 months

A composite story drawn from several user journeys. Names and details have been changed.

Sarah was grading papers at 11:47pm on a Tuesday in October 2024 when she opened a new browser tab and typed "how to quit teaching without starting over." She'd been a seventh-grade math teacher for nine years. She was 33, had $41,000 in student loans from her master's degree, and her take-home pay after benefits came to $2,890 a month.

The tab she opened next was a Codecademy free trial.

The setup

Sarah wasn't burned out in the dramatic way. She liked her students. She liked the "aha" moments. What she didn't like was the rest of it: the 60-hour weeks during testing season, the parent emails at 10pm, the $340 she spent on classroom supplies in September alone.

Her husband worked in logistics and made fine money, but they'd been trying to save for a house for four years and weren't getting anywhere. Childcare costs, if they had a kid, would roughly equal her entire salary.

She'd looked at adjacent options before. Instructional design. EdTech. Curriculum consulting. Every one of them required either more school or a step backwards in pay. She kept hearing the same thing from friends who'd made jumps: "you should learn to code."

The turning point

The turning point wasn't a dramatic moment. It was a spreadsheet.

In November 2024, Sarah built a spreadsheet of every software developer job posted in her metro area for two weeks. She tracked salary (when listed), years of experience required, and what the "must-haves" actually were. The median listed salary for junior roles was $71,000. The most common required stack was JavaScript, React, and some kind of SQL.

She gave herself a hard deadline: nine months. If she didn't have an offer by August 2025, she'd go back to teaching and forget the whole thing.

What she did, month by month

Months 1–2 (Nov–Dec 2024): She did The Odin Project's Foundations path. Two hours on weekdays after school, six hours on Saturdays. She finished HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript. Total spent: $0.

Month 3 (Jan 2025): She bought a Udemy React course ($14.99 on sale) and built three small projects: a to-do app, a weather app, and a quiz app for her students using the state capitals. That last one got her 40 seventh-graders beta-testing her work, which was more QA feedback than most junior devs ever get.

Months 4–5 (Feb–Mar 2025): She built her "portfolio project." A gradebook tool that let teachers import student scores from CSVs and visualize distributions. She picked it because (a) she understood the domain, (b) it gave her something to talk about in interviews besides another to-do app, and (c) she could actually show it to teacher friends and get real feedback.

She also started a LinkedIn posting habit. Once a week, a short post about something she'd learned. She had 60 followers in February. By May she had 1,200.

Month 6 (Apr 2025): She applied to her first 15 jobs. She got zero responses.

Month 7 (May 2025): She rewrote her CV. Out: "passionate educator with a love of learning." In: specific projects, specific technologies, specific outcomes ("built a gradebook tool used by 12 teachers at my school, processing 4,000+ student records"). She applied to another 30 roles. Got two phone screens. Bombed both.

Month 8 (Jun 2025): This was the month she almost quit.

She'd been rejected from a role she was sure she'd get. She cried in her car in the school parking lot. That night she posted about it on LinkedIn — not a woe-is-me post, but an honest "here's what I got wrong in the interview" post. It got 400 likes and, more usefully, three DMs from engineering managers offering to do mock interviews with her.

Month 9 (Jul 2025): She did 11 mock interviews. She applied to 24 more roles. She got six phone screens, four technical rounds, and two offers. She took the one that paid $78,000, at a mid-sized healthcare SaaS company.

What worked

The gradebook project worked. In every single interview, she got asked about it. It turned her teaching background from a liability ("why should we hire a teacher?") into an asset ("oh, you actually understand the users").

The LinkedIn posts worked. Two of her final interviews came from inbound messages, not applications.

The deadline worked. Without it, she would have drifted for two years.

What didn't

Applying cold on LinkedIn Easy Apply was a near-total waste. She counted: 87 Easy Apply applications yielded one phone screen.

Trying to learn everything was a waste. She spent three weeks on TypeScript in month five because she thought she needed it. None of her interviewers asked about it. She could have spent that time on more interview practice.

Hiding her teaching background in the first version of her CV was a mistake. Every time she downplayed it, she sounded like a generic bootcamp grad with no portfolio. When she leaned into it, she stood out.

Where she is now

Sarah started at the SaaS company in September 2025. As of this writing, she's eight months in, still at the same company, and was just told she's on track for promotion to mid-level in the spring.

Her total compensation this year will be around $86,000 with the bonus — nearly double what she made teaching. She and her husband closed on a house in March.

Her 60-hour weeks are over. She logs off at 5:30.

The takeaway

If you're reading this as a teacher, or a nurse, or a social worker, or anyone in a job that's drained you: the skills you have are not a handicap. You know how to learn hard things under pressure. You know how to explain complicated ideas to people who don't share your context. You know how to stay calm when someone is melting down.

Nine months is not nothing. It's a real commitment. But it is also, genuinely, not that long. Sarah's students from October 2024 were still in the same grade when she got her offer.

The deadline helped. The portfolio that mattered to her mattered in interviews. And the month she almost quit was the month that, in hindsight, made the whole thing work — because that's when she stopped hiding who she was and started using it.