Key Takeaways
- A fulfilled dream became the trigger: After 17 years running her own Café, Yuki realized the day-to-day had turned into routine, and that feeling pushed her toward something new.
- A rejection redirected her path: A scholarship rejection from a university told her plainly that she didn’t need a degree, she needed a bootcamp.
- Age turned out not to be the obstacle she feared: Her real challenge was the intensity of the bootcamp itself, not her ability to learn at 47.
The sun-drenched slopes of Madeira, encircled by the North Atlantic, are not the sort of place where anyone would expect to plunge into an existential crisis. Yet Yuki Grosbüsch, owner of a Café in Berlin and aged 47 at the time, returned from the archipelago loaded not with souvenirs but with doubts about her life.
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An existential crisis on the sunny slopes of Madeira
‘I was there to help a friend with a small film festival he had organized,’ says Yuki today. ‘I realized that working there made me happier than I felt at my Café, at my own business. That’s when I knew something had to change.’
From physics student to café owner in Berlin
Yuki’s path into the food and beverage business had been anything but linear. At university she had studied physics, but was eventually discouraged from pursuing that any further. ‘When you’re young and insecure and you are surrounded on a daily basis by comments about women in science, it chips away at your self-esteem. Starting something of my own, I didn’t have to hear people telling me “women can’t do this”.’
So she moved from her home in little Darmstadt (Hessen) to Berlin, that city of bustling streets, culture and counter-culture, and started out by working as a barista for others. She learned much about the trade, the grind, the early-morning hubbub, the after-hours maintenance, and the many underground terms of Berlin’s ‘Third Wave Coffee’ culture.
Then she put her savings to work, and ‘Yuki’s Espresso Bar’ opened in Friedrichshain in spring of 2004.
‘Owning a Café was a dream that ran in the family,’ she remembers fondly. ‘It wasn’t just about cooking, although I do love to cook. It was about creating a space where people from different strata of society could come together, where the many lives of Berlin could intersect and brush sides.’
When a fulfilled dream starts to feel like routine
The unexpected trouble about dreams, however, is that there comes a point when they are fulfilled.
‘I managed my Café for almost 17 years, and I am proud of that,’ says Yuki, looking back. ‘But there came a point when I realized that my day-to-day felt boring. It felt like work had become just routine, like I had nothing left to learn or discover. When I went to Madeira to help my friend with his film festival, and once again I felt the joy that comes from getting my hands dirty, I decided it was time to try something new with my life.’
Too old to learn? A rejection that redirected her
Yuki remembered that she’d been good at programming back in her university days, and she knew that tech was a field that was desperate for qualified personnel. But that option seemed scary for a variety of reasons.
‘I knew I wouldn’t be able to use what I had learned in the 90s. And at 47, there was the simple question, am I too old to learn to code? Am I still mentally equipped, am I still lucid enough for this sort of thing?’
Among her initial, tentative applications was one for a scholarship at Berlin’s CODE University of Applied Sciences. Yuki was rejected, but that rejection was precisely what pushed her onto the right path.
‘They gave me some pretty comprehensive feedback. They said, you’re already a grown-up, you don’t need to learn the basics of how to work, and you want to learn quickly. You don’t need a university degree, you need a coding bootcamp. I did a little bit of research, and I realized they were right. There were tons of bootcamps out there, I just needed to find the right one for me.’
The ‘right one’ turned out to be the WBS CODING SCHOOL AI Software Development Course, the modern equivalent of the Full-Stack Web & App Development bootcamp she originally enrolled in. ‘It was longer than most other bootcamps, and seemed more comprehensive and realistic about the process of learning to code. I asked some of my friends who knew about tech, and they recommended exactly what was in the bootcamp’s syllabus. On top of it all, financing was covered by the Arbeitsagentur. I thought, let’s give this a go.’
A stressful first week, and a supportive instructor
Contrary to her initial worries, being lucid was not an obstacle, but the intensive nature of coding bootcamps was. ‘The first week was one of the most stressful in my grown-up life,’ she says today. ‘There was lots of work, lots of sleepless nights. I had to structure my day with precision just to keep track of what was going on.
‘Sometimes I asked myself “What did I get myself into?”, but then I saw that it was a common thing, everyone else was struggling too. And our instructor, Ben, was incredibly helpful and supportive.’
And so, after 3 months of gritting her teeth and working hard, Yuki graduated from her bootcamp in April 2021, and completed her butterfly-like transformation from Café owner to Full-Stack Web Developer!
Technical Consultant today: a changed industry for women in tech
Today she works as a Technical Consultant at FDM, and she says the most beautiful thing about the new world she has found is how different it is from the old world she first made contact with as a physics student.
‘Times have changed a lot for women in tech,’ she says with a smile. ‘During the bootcamp I never heard inappropriate comments, jokes about girls or anything like that. And in my current job too, although the gender ratio is still not 50:50, the fact that women work as programmers is seen as something totally normal, not as an anomaly. Honestly, just being surrounded by other women feels so encouraging.’
And so, at the end of her old dream of owning a Café, it works out that another dream was waiting for her, but for Yuki, this is far from the end.
‘I see my life as something that is continuously developing,’ she says as we wrap up our interview. ‘And I know now that “too old to learn” is not an argument. I don’t really think about the past anymore, and I know that there are big shifts happening in the world of tech. My job, our jobs, will change again in the future. And I am going to embrace that.’
Is a career change in your 40s realistic in tech?
A career change in your 40s is realistic in tech because employers and bootcamps alike increasingly value structured, motivated adult learners over younger candidates with less life or work experience. The real barrier is rarely mental capacity or age itself, but the intensity of condensed learning formats, which a supportive, well-structured bootcamp is specifically designed to manage. As Yuki’s story shows, a rejection or setback along the way can also be a useful redirect toward the right format, rather than a sign to give up.
Ready to make your own career change, at any age?
- Explore our AI Software Development Course, the modern equivalent of the bootcamp that helped Yuki become a Full-Stack Web Developer.
- Read more WBS CODING SCHOOL success stories.
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