For most of us, a ten-minute bus ride through the tranquil summer daylight of Stuttgart would be a perfect opportunity to relax. For 27-year-old Du\u0161an Varcakovi\u0107, sitting at the back of the bus as he returned home from work was his time to think of an escape plan. He had spent his early 20s cultivating a promising career which eventually landed him a well-paid, stable job as Digital Strategist for a big healthcare firm, working on fields he was interested in with people he liked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In June of 2020 he was desperately looking for a way out of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI had what in many ways was a great job. But there was no challenge there, no room to really grow,\u201d he says today. Our interview takes place rigorously online: like most of us in the tech industry, he has been forced into home-office by the Covid-19 pandemic, but as Product Owner for the German startup Otto Wilde Grillers, the switch has multiplied his entrepreneurial challenges ten-fold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Du\u0161an doesn\u2019t seem to mind. Indeed, as we discuss his experiences before and after our bootcamp, he comes across to me as one of a relatively uncommon type of worker \u2013 the sort who is happier when he has problems in his hands than when he doesn\u2019t. \u201cI actually have trouble enjoying regular fun,\u201d he admits, \u201cbecause whenever I get into an activity, I always find myself looking for a bigger picture, for some kind of overarching vision. It\u2019s like I have this weird force inside me that is always pushing me forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was by following that \u201cweird force\u201d from the very beginning that Du\u0161an had picked up skills that would be valuable in tech. At 13 years of age, he had taught himself some rudimentary web development on the (now archaeological) HTML editor Microsoft FrontPage. By the time he was 19, he had organised his online Counter Strike gaming community into an e-sports club capable of competing internationally, inclusive of a website he had personally designed. But after his professional apprenticeship, he discovered the local employment culture seemed naturally geared towards passive, stable, salaried positions like the one he\u2019d found in Stuttgart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf I wanted to change my career, I had to step out of the program which I was being unconsciously funnelled into. I took the leap and signed up for the WBS CODING SCHOOL bootcamp in web development.\u201d While most people take coding bootcamps in order to learn programming, though, he was more interested in learning about programmers. \u201cI\u2019d long since realised something. The reason developers liked to work with me was that I wasn\u2019t just some businessman ordering them around with no clue what coding was really about. I was one of them. And I wanted to push this relationship further, which you can\u2019t really do with online tutorials by yourself. In brief, I direly needed a community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the end, I took this bootcamp because I wanted to learn by listening to other people. It\u2019s so easy for entrepreneurs to fall in love with their own ideas, but this course helped me see the great ideas that others come up with, their unique problem-solving perspectives, their ways of thinking. A team-leader needs to know about these qualities if he or she is to harness them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAlso, having a top-notch instructor really allowed me to take my work to the next level. If you are by yourself, there is always a limit to how deep you can go. You can ask Google a question \u2013 but there will be nobody to teach you how<\/em> to ask Google the right questions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Du\u0161an was able to put his new skills to use even earlier than he expected \u2013 as it happens, he was offered his current job as Product Owner three weeks before his course with us was over! \u201cThe pandemic had forced me to start looking for work early. Fortunately, a lot of the questions they asked me in the interview were exactly about the sort of skills I had been developing in the course.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On this happy ending my interview with Du\u0161an could comfortably find closure. And yet, speaking with such a distinctly business-minded developer, there is one final question I am impelled to ask: what advice would he give to someone who dreams of a tech career as open, free and entrepreneurial as his own?<\/p>\n\n\n\n He thinks about it for a moment, then replies with the same debonair smile: \u201cEvery entrepreneur, of today and of tomorrow, should be a tech-savvy person. You should understand why and how your code works, even if you didn\u2019t code it yourself. So, if you\u2019ve never done this before, don\u2019t be intimidated by programming. Go out and try things you haven\u2019t tried before, and the rest will follow.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Du\u0161an Varcakovi\u0107 wanted to bring together tech and business in his career. He found the only way to do that was to step off the beaten path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":3036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-careers","category-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3034"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62641,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions\/62641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wbscodingschool.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}