#career change to tech

[insightfultake]

Why Computing and Data Science Careers Are the Smartest Bet for Job Aspirants in 2025

In an age where automation is reshaping industries and artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction, careers in computing and data science have emerged as some of the most future-proof and financially rewarding options for job seekers. From building intelligent applications to unlocking hidden insights in big data, professionals equipped with digital skills are becoming indispensable across sectors like finance, healthcare, defence, agriculture, and retail.

[the-pea-and-the-sun]

changing my major to looney tunes

[excelsior9173]

should’ve been a roadie when i had the chance…

contract company rolled through my city last year and had an orientation at our local arena… i was going to go and then got stuck with a bunch of work at my current job

i think that will forever be the opportunity i will feel the most regret over not taking

[snowcodes]

Life Update things!

Started my morning with a meeting from the uni I'm about to start in September. They were super lovely about my health needs, and I'm excited to start the course!

I'm still working through my current separate course to become a full stack developer and doing my best to practice a bit of code each day. The course I'm currently on is partnered with Codecademy, so I'm currently working through their career path.

There are so many projects to get through on codecademy, which can be a bit daunting...but I have to keep telling myself that it will all get easier with practice.

Practice, practice.... practice!!

My stupid health may have turned my life upside down in terms of what I wanted to do career....but I'm not giving up my chances of having a good job and a good life. So....

...

Screw you, Fibromyalgia.

I'm gonna do all the things you keep trying to stop me from doing.

[clonerightsagenda]

Spent the day at a very annoying in service that included a chiropractor keynote speaker insisting the youth anxiety crisis is due to drinking coffee but one administrator did share her backstory which included getting mauled by a rabid bobcat so that kept the event interesting at least.

[plumbits]

y'all genuinely i think i'm so over and done with vet med. this industry doesn't JUST not give two shits about us or our job positions, it actively hates us.

prop 129 never should've been on the ballot in colorado. the concept never should've come to fruition. it never should've even been a THOUGHT in people's minds when technicians are the ones who keep this industry afloat. when technicians can't get living wages. when technicians can't get title protection.

why would anyone choose to work in this field? i cannot find a reason good enough anymore.

[kids-worldfun]

Are Online IT Courses Suitable for Career Changers?

Career change is a bold decision that requires determination and consideration for the development of proper skill sets. On the other hand, one of the most effective ways to build such skills for those who wish to transition into the field of technology will be through online IT courses. Whichever sector one comes from—be it finance, marketing, education, or any other sector—IT has huge…

[the-physicality]

20 years later, the mercury have not changed lmao

[alisheaburgess]

Dev Diaries: Day 8...We Back!!!

Dev Diaries, Masterlist

Romancing the Process...coming soon

June 4, 2023

The Day number will just be a log number as I may not do Dev stuff every day. I'll be including the dates though.

Now that I have a month to take classes, I'm going to be a bit more strategic with what I'm taking and when. I want to get the most out of this 😊

For the Dev side, I'm going to finish up the bigger courses that I wasn't able to get into before. They will mainly be HTML and CSS. There are a couple of them that have intros to Python and the like. I have already had a little bit of Python in other courses, so I'm kinda looking forward to that one and more C# 😁 that's the one I'll be learning for my game dev stuff.

For the Diaries though...

I'm thinking about having a separate Design Diary (non-web design) and Doodle Diary because I'm also going to be working on those. I mainly want to so I can find things easier later but also... so I remember what all I'm doing now 😂😋

I am starting Romancing the Process! Which is just a diary of all the crazy stuff I'm learning, trying, and just my story as I experience it. I think it's gonna be fun (for me at least lol)

My goal for this month is to be as job ready as I possibly can be! I'm going to be purging my belongings as well in case I need to move. This will trick my brain into cleaning which is useful even if I don't move 😅 I'll be going over this more in Romancing the Process. I am trying to get a balance of input (learning) and output (creating). This is gonna be so much fun!!!!

Weekly DevPlan:

Courses to Tackle for the Week (starts Monday, today is bonus)

Improve UX Prototyping

HTML

CSS

Soft Dev

Full-stack Dev

1 Class at a time! 😊

The prototyping course is introductions to a bunch of tools you can use. It's kinda boring to start but then I turn into a child when they start the actual prototyping part 😂🤣 It's so much fun and I can't wait to get to play...I mean...use them.

I won't be doing each of these every day. They are in order of importance. I want to get the first three done this week. The bottom two be the least important and can take all month if need be lol

I've already done a prototyping course but it's super close to being completely done. I've almost exhausted their library of UX stuff 😅🥰 This is the last fuller course they have for it. After that it's just shorter courses that I plan to filter in.

Let's Go!!!

[jcmarchi]

Mauricio Vergara, CEO & Co-Founder of Kapwork – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/mauricio-vergara-ceo-co-founder-of-kapwork-interview-series/

Mauricio Vergara, CEO & Co-Founder of Kapwork – Interview Series

Mauricio Vergara, CEO and Co-Founder of Kapwork, oversees the company’s operations, sales, and marketing. As a former small business owner, he experienced firsthand the strain that late payments place on growing companies. Later, during his time at Google and Unity, he saw how delayed payments negatively affected creators, stalling their ability to scale. Motivated to find a better solution, he began exploring the space—quickly realizing how limited the funding options are for small businesses and how challenging it is for funders to support them effectively.

This led to the creation of Kapwork, a platform that simplifies revenue-based financing by connecting businesses with capital providers through a transparent and frictionless experience. Designed to support the next generation of entrepreneurs, Kapwork helps businesses grow on their terms by turning future revenue into immediate funding.

What inspired you to start Kapwork, and how did your personal experience as a small business owner in Colombia shape your vision for transforming the factoring industry?

I used to run a restaurant and a catering business in Colombia. To this day, I remember when the first customer walked through the door and thinking to myself, “she is here because I have something to offer. Something that adds value.” It was such a surreal experience that I later validated at Google.

Working directly with app and game developers, I realized how much I loved helping people who can create something where nothing was before. Developers, like SMB owners, are the craftsmen and women of the modern age, and for me, there is nothing more satisfying than helping those who create value, generate wealth. That is why I started Kapwork with Pete Thomas. There was a whole sector, critical to our economy, that had been largely ignored by technology. AI has unlocked so much opportunity for transformation, why leave any frontier behind? It’s such a dense problem, and I was drawn to finally try my hand at building a company from the ground up. As Peter Thiel puts it in Zero to One: “A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery”.

You’ve described invoice factoring as a lifeline for small businesses. What does that lifeline look like today, and how is Kapwork reshaping it?

Cashflow is the lifeline for small businesses and without Factoring providing it for them, many of these companies would simply go out of business. In B2B it’s customary to see stretched out payment terms of 30 to 90 days outstanding. Imagine being at the mercy of large corporations waiting to get paid for services and products you’ve already delivered. Without Factoring providing the necessary working capital, these businesses can’t grow and in some cases, can even go out of business.  Factoring has been around for more than 100 years to bridge these gaps, purchasing invoices and delivering capital–but it hasn’t scaled yet. It’s a highly manual, risky and time-intensive process for thousands of factors around the globe.

Kapwork was started to overhaul these operations; we’re putting AI and automation to work to accelerate workflows, reduce errors and scale more effectively. This means more money flowing to businesses. Factoring helps businesses thrive, and Kapwork helps those Factors and the small businesses who rely on them.

Kapwork’s platform includes a self-healing AI agent. Can you explain what that means in practical terms, and how it enhances the factoring process?

Kapwork functions by deploying agents across a huge number of vendor portals to pull and populate data. Traditionally, these types of automations are hard to build and really expensive to keep online, when something changes within the web portal, for example. In that case, the entire process creates more headaches than benefits, and throws reliability into question. We had to develop an approach to prevent this.

When we say that our AI agents are “self-healing,” we mean that when an existing Kapwork AI agent experiences a fatal error due to some new, external change that prevents it from achieving its goal, this same Agent can invoke an AI process to evaluate what changed and indicate how it needs to be modified or replaced to continue working again. This capability is what gives Kapwork our durability, we always retrieve the needed data. When our current approach breaks because a web site changed, we don’t go back and come up with a new approach, instead we let AI do that for us automatically.

What were the biggest technical hurdles in building an AI platform that integrates with 4,000+ vendor portals and financial systems?

The first big technical hurdle is that most Vendor Management Systems (VMS) do not provide APIs, so Kapwork AI Agents had to be designed to navigate the identical VMS interfaces that humans use. These interfaces can be unreliable when it comes to automating data retrieval, with some changing form and function every few months, so we really had to develop a robust error correction system in our agentic framework so Kapwork Agents remain durable despite the inherently unreliable environment and can seamlessly address errors as they notice them.

The second big technical hurdle is the fact that every VMS is different. Although debtors that use Ariba and Coupa generally offer the same user interface for data retrieval, thousands of other debtors in “the long tail” follow no interface standard and present the data funders need in all sorts of non-intuitive, cumbersome ways. To stay efficient, we had to develop an agentic AI system that can explore any portal it hasn’t seen before and quickly figure out where to get the required data and how to write a reliable program to get it.

Finally, the lack of APIs made determining responsible password management protocols to facilitate automation an incredibly challenging hurdle. Non-traditional finance is in general guilty of bad password hygiene.  We often see multiple parties often sharing various account credentials to prove to each other that parties and counterparties are storing the right data in the right systems. So, when it comes to helping this industry automate data verification at scale, defining compliant security protocols and promoting best practices took a lot of research and discussions with operators working in the space today.

How does Kapwork use AI to verify invoices in seconds—something that used to take 1–2 days of manual effort?

Because Kapwork AI Agents work concurrently, for example, retrieving data from 20 portals simultaneously, we can verify invoice data at scale. The data can also then be populated automatically into a centralized dashboard for a comprehensive view of the pipeline.  This is in contrast to most financial teams in the business of verification today, wherein one person can only log into one portal at a time, find the data they need, download it, log out, log back in for their next client, etc., and proceed to move onto the next VMS when they are finished with the first one. Until today, people were doing all this work by hand, in serial fashion, making their way through a large book of confirmations that can take a single person days to complete.

What kind of data validation or fraud detection capabilities does your AI system offer, and how do they compare with traditional approaches?

Regarding fraud detection today, Kapwork describes our unique capability as “anomaly detection.” We are not currently applying any specialized AI to this problem but instead leaning on the fact that the data aggregation by Kapwork AI Agents’ naturally builds up patterns of how two companies do business together, what the value ranges are for things like amount and due date, and whether there is always a purchase order associated with a receivable. As patterns establish over time, Kapwork can detect possible fraud by showing a recent transaction or set of transactions fall outside the range of what is considered “normal” business, and alert the customer. Much of this could be missed by the human eye and normal processes. It’s an area of exploration and we’re excited to do more here in the future.

What role does AI play in improving deal flow and conversion rates for invoice buyers on your platform?

A Factor typically needs one to three months to underwrite an invoice seller. During that time, the seller remains desperate for cash while the factor keeps their capital idle at the bank. Kapwork’s AI instantly verifies invoice data, pulling records directly from debtor systems and delivering a vetted “AP snapshot” that allows credit teams to approve or decline the receivables facility in days, not months. The system also allows factors to verify invoices from their existing customer base more frequently without assuming additional headcount, enabling them to deploy capital faster.

You’ve held leadership roles at Google and Unity. What lessons from Big Tech helped you when transitioning into startup life at Kapwork?

In three ways. It helped me realize that I didn’t want to spend more time watching paint dry, shaped me as a leader, and gave me the confidence to realize that I can always try and figure things out.

In the words of Marc Randolph,  “everything is solvable if you’re willing to start and figure it out.” When I first worked at Google and Unity, I often felt impostor syndrome. Having come from a more humble background than my often IVY league colleagues, I used to doubt my worth but Google taught me that if I was there, it was for a reason. As I started to progress in my career, I gained the confidence to know that, even though I don’t know how to do something, all I need to do is start. With time, you can always figure it out.

Google also shaped me as a leader. It taught me that nothing scales faster than getting people behind a clear vision that they believe in. It also helped me understand what is needed to create a healthy environment where everyone can express their opinions without worry about retribution. Nothing helps a company grow faster than a smart team of proactive individuals rallied around a vision who are willing to challenge your thinking and commit.

Finally, Big Tech also helped me realise that I didn’t want to watch the paint dry any longer. There are so many hierarchies and embedded interests that it is always hard to challenge the status quo. The systems in place are designed to reduce risk and in some cases leads to employees being more preoccupied with signaling the good work they do than actually doing the work. I didn’t want that in my life anymore, especially when you see the world moving at the speed of light with all the recent developments in AI.

What’s your vision for how AI will further transform the financial services industry—particularly in underserved SMB segments?

Heterogeneity is good for society and bad for the lending industry. I find it fascinating how the diversity amongst small businesses makes it hard for them to find working capital solutions.

What literally makes SMBs special, makes it hard for them to grow. Just think about the diversity of SMBs. On one side, you have a family-owned hardware wholesaler and on the other, a boutique artisan bakery. Both are great in that they contribute uniquely, but the way these are run and operated is completely different. The variety of industries, financials, and business models makes it incredibly hard for lenders to make up their mind about them and for SMBs, to navigate the landscape. So how do you assess diverse businesses without a one size fits all approach? AI has been a tool to bridge that gap for a while but it was always cost prohibitive.

In my opinion, what is most interesting is that it finally makes economic sense to build solutions to tackle these challenges. More affordable AI will make it possible for the financial industry to build solutions for a highly fragmented and heterogenous SMB industry.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Kapwork.

[thegftable-uk]

What Jobs Have I Had? Here’s the Honest, Slightly Fishy List

[manojnaironline]

What jobs have you had?

As part of my career I took up jobs in different fields. Beginning in uniform, serving in the armed forces and security agencies. Picture this: wielding everything from pistols to heavy machine guns, patrolling borders, and dedicating myself to my country. It was intense, disciplined, and rewarding—a chapter that shaped me in ways I never imagined. But life has a way of shifting gears. I traded…

[rsoemardja]

Breaking Free from a Dead-End Job: Navigating the Path to a Tech Career

Tired of being stuck in a cycle and ready to break free. I’ve written countless posts about embracing setbacks, finding your purpose, and the importance of perseverance. But as I sit here, typing away in a role that feels increasingly like a dead end. The words start to feel hollow. It’s easy to preach resilience when you’re not the one drowning in monotony and self-doubt. Every time I push…

[the-daughter-of-lilith]

After 7 years I'm officially changing careers.

It's taken me 2 years to come to the understanding I'm not fit or capable enough to be in Cybersecurity, unfortunately. It's been very hard to accept this. I have far too much trauma, and it's psychically changed how my brain functions, despite trying medication and various forms of therapy. I've spent many months grieving the inevitable end to something I spent tons of time and energy involved in, but I know I must do it for my own happiness.

After all, 7 is my lucky number, so I'm optimistic I'll find something else. Goodbye infosec.

[charlessmithpost]

Unlock Your Potential with a Business Analytics Certification

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How to Choose the Right Certification

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Ensure the program covers the topics you are interested in. Look for courses that provide practical, hands-on experience with real-world data.

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A certification can lead to higher salaries. It demonstrates your commitment to the field and your expertise, making you a more attractive candidate for high-paying roles.

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Continuing education through certification helps you grow professionally. It keeps you up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in business analytics.

A business analytics certification is a valuable investment in your career. It enhances your skills, improves your job prospects, and keeps you competitive in a data-driven world.

[bazilisk]

Journal: Plans on going into public ed after grad school

I have matriculated to go to grad school! I'm going to become a school librarian! F the tech world (in 2+ years because the school will take 2 years while I still work in tech for 2 years, this will be a VERY LONG period of senior-itis.) (I can already tell that the senior-itis will get SO bad, that I should look for another job in the meantime, and INDEED I am doing exactly that. F this working from home S. It is great for some people, but not for me.)