There are those who pick a career, and those who find themselves picked by one: for Ve Maricic, it was politics that recruited her, before she even had the time to graduate.
A student of Corporate Communication at the Vienna Fachhochschule, in 2014 she started on an internship with the Social Democratic Party while learning, but the party asked her to stay on once they realised she had a marked talent for writing rousing speeches and pamphlets.
‘Towards the end of my studies I was struggling with my thesis,’ says Ve today. ‘To be honest, I was kind of relieved to drop out of my learning program and pursue a career in the world of politics. I walked out of higher education without an academic title, sure, but I already had a job.’
As the years wore on, however, Ve’s initial optimism was slowly eroded. ‘It took a while, but in due time I burned out. Politics is incredibly demanding, and it takes real steel to do something like that all your life.
‘I came to a point where I felt like I had a stone wedged inside my mental engines. I started feeling exhausted all the time, doing everything at the last minute, missing my deadlines, putting myself under more and more pressure even as I tried to flee from it.’
Forced to quit her job and plagued by aggravating physical and psychological symptoms, Ve sought out medical help, and her exams returned a bombshell of a result – she was not simply burned out. She was also diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.
‘Most people who are diagnosed late in life have at least the suspicion that they may be neurodivergent, but to me it came as a complete shock. I had to rethink my life from the bottom up.’
The problem was that Ve, at this point, was not in a very good position to start something new. She could not go back to the type of work she was doing, as her mental health would not allow it. She did not have an academic title, as she hadn’t finished her degree. She had to find a different line of work, one that she could get into even with no experience and no titles – but what?
‘I went through a great deal of emotions when I was given my diagnosis. I struggled a lot with it, naturally – but I also felt very driven to change. It was then that I remembered a very short part-time job that I did a long time ago, before I even started with politics – a job that had introduced me to web development.’
That job could have been one of those accidents of life that we all experience and then slot away in a dusty drawer: a friend of Ve needed some help with administrative work for a project he was doing, but he quickly realised she was better suited for technical work. So he taught her the rudiments of web development of that time, meaning HTML, CSS, and a Content Management System called TYPO3.
‘The more I thought about web development, the more it made sense to me as a career that I could do,’ she says, remembering how her indecision slowly melted away. ‘It has none of the subjectivity of political writing – instead it is predictable, precise. The problem-solving component was stimulating, and the career it offered seemed flexible.’
And so, in October of 2022, Ve took the plunge and signed up for a WBS CODING SCHOOL Full-Stack Web & App Development Bootcamp.
‘I thought from the beginning that a bootcamp had a structure that would be perfect for a neurodivergent individual like me. It doesn’t ask that you self-organise – instead, it throws a ton of learning material and exercises at you, and you just have to learn and solve them all, one step at a time.’
The results of the bootcamp showed very quickly: ‘When I was about to graduate, I remembered my old boss who had offered me that part-time job where I first learned web development, and I texted him to let him know what I was doing. He ended up offering me another job, albeit a temporary one!’
At the same time, her career since showed her that it’s not all sunshine and roses.
‘I thought perhaps tech would be more accepting of people with neurodivergent conditions, but hunting for jobs showed me that was not the case. I had one interview where they asked me if I was “like Rain Man”.’
While the industry clearly has work to do to become more accepting, Ve was still able to find much that she liked in her new line of work.
‘Today, I’m working as a web developer. I was looking for something to improve my quality of life, and now I am working remotely from home, on problems that are logical, and with the privilege to work at my own pace. Once I knew what my needs were, I knew what I was looking for. And I think I have found it.’
Ve Maricic graduated from a WBS CODING SCHOOL Full-Stack Web & App Development Bootcamp in February 2023, and is currently employed as a Full-Stack Web Developer for Datora Systems.
