This Piece Makes It Easy For You To Become A tech Bro/Sis

[justseyi]

Source: Zikoko 

Tolu still remembers the day she almost quit tech before she even started.

She was 28, armed with a Law degree and a résumé full of “legal assistant” lines that nobody in Lagos was reading. Her cousin, a product manager at a fintech startup, had dragged her to a weekend hackathon. “Just come,” he said. “You don’t need to code.”

Tolu showed up in heels, clutching a notepad like it was evidence in court. The room was chaos—whiteboards, sticky notes, people arguing over button colors. She sat in the corner, pretending to take notes, secretly googling “What is a user story?”

By lunchtime, a designer asked if she could help interview users. “You’re a lawyer,” he said. “You know how to ask questions.” Thirty minutes later, Tolu was moderating a focus group, translating legalese into plain English, watching strangers light up when they finally understood an app feature.

That night, she stayed till 2 a.m., squatting on the floor beside a senior PM who was sketching wireframes on butcher paper. “I don’t get it,” she whispered. The PM didn’t laugh. She just slid the marker over. “Draw what you think should happen next.”

Six months later, Tolu had a junior product role, a salary triple her old one, and a LinkedIn headline that made her uncle choke on his garri: Product Manager | ex-Lawyer | Turning confusion into clarity.

The Lie We All Believed
We were told tech is a members-only club for Computer Science graduates. Gatekeepers in hoodies, speaking in acronyms, guarding the door with algorithms.

Wrong.

Tech is a city with a thousand entrances. Product. Operations. Content. Community. UX writing. Growth. You don’t need to build the app to own the blueprint.

Your English degree? Perfect for crafting error messages that don’t make users cry. Your Adult Education background? Gold for designing onboarding flows that actually teach. That time you organized your church harvest and nobody fought over jollof? Congratulations—you just ran a project retrospective.

The tools? Learnable. The platforms? Googleable. The jargon? Fake it till you decode it.

But the curiosity, the clarity, the stubborn refusal to stay confused—those are non-negotiable.

Start Before You’re Ready (Because You Never Will Be)
Waiting for the perfect moment is like waiting for Lagos traffic to vanish. You’ll grow old on Third Mainland Bridge.

Tolu’s first move wasn’t a bootcamp or a certification. It was volunteering to redesign her friend’s business Instagram. Then shadowing a PM who let her sit in on stand-ups. Then taking meeting notes nobody asked for, just to learn the rhythm.

Opportunity hopping, not job hopping.

Every “yes” was a brick. Every “I don’t know, teach me” was mortar.

Stay Teachable or Stay Broke
Tech moves like danfo on a free day. What worked yesterday is obsolete tomorrow.

Being teachable isn’t humblebragging on LinkedIn. It’s survival.

It’s admitting—in a room full of nodding experts—that you don’t understand OKRs. It’s squatting on the floor during a training because the only empty seat is pride. It’s asking the intern to explain Figma while the CEO pretends not to listen.

The fastest climbers aren’t the smartest. They’re the ones who care more about learning than looking smart.

Let Curiosity Drag You
The best careers in tech don’t follow résumés—they follow rabbit holes.

You start playing with Canva for your cousin’s wedding IV and end up redesigning dashboards for a SaaS company. You manage your church WhatsApp group and accidentally discover community-led growth. You read one too many App Store reviews and realize you’re obsessed with why people churn.

Curiosity isn’t nosy. It’s navigation.

You Need People (Sorry, Introverts)
Nobody pivots alone.

You need the friend who slides you a job description before it goes live. The mentor who tears your CV to shreds and hands you the red pen. The community that celebrates your first “Hello World” like you just won a Grammy.

LinkedIn isn’t for motivational quotes. It’s for sliding into DMs with “I saw your post about OKRs—can I buy you coffee and pick your brain?”

Twitter isn’t doomscrolling. It’s finding the UX writer who started as a teacher and asking, “How?”

Your Turn
Tolu doesn’t have a CS degree. She has a story. A series of small, stubborn yeses that turned confusion into currency.

The door to tech isn’t locked. It’s just heavy. Push.

Start with one volunteer gig. One course. One coffee chat. One question you’re scared to ask.

The industry isn’t waiting for you to be perfect. It’s waiting for you to be curious.

So, what are you curious about today?

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