If you are teaching English in Japan and quietly wondering whether you could become a software engineer instead — yes, you can. I have watched many people make exactly that jump, and through Find a Doc and the Nekko Labs community I have helped a lot of them do it.
I am not going to pretend it is easy or fast. But it is learnable and repeatable, and the people who succeed tend to do the same handful of things. This is the short version of advice I give over and over. The long version is The Guide.
Why teachers actually have an edge
It is easy to feel like you are starting from zero. You are not. Teaching builds skills that the industry is desperate for and that pure coders often lack:
- Explaining hard things simply — this is the job in code review, documentation, and design discussions.
- Patience and structured practice — you already know how people learn, including yourself.
- Showing up consistently — the single biggest predictor of who makes it.
- Working with people — engineering is a team sport, and "can write code" is table stakes.
Your background is an asset. Lead with it.
The traps that stall people
The people who don't make it rarely fail for lack of intelligence. They get stuck in predictable ways:
- Tutorial purgatory. Endlessly watching courses, never building. You learn to code by building things that break and fixing them, not by collecting certificates.
- Learning everything before building anything. You do not need to master computer science before you make a website. Build first, fill gaps as you hit them.
- Solo forever. The biggest jump is going from personal projects to working on a real team. More on that below.
- Waiting to feel ready. Nobody feels ready. The job market rewards demonstrated ability, not confidence.
The path that works
Roughly, in order:
- Pick one path and one language. Web development with JavaScript/TypeScript is the most beginner-friendly with the most jobs in Japan. Don't agonize — pick and go.
- Build real, finishable projects. Small things you actually complete and deploy beat ambitious things you abandon.
- Get on a real team — this is the unlock. Contributing to open source on an actual team teaches you the things solo projects never will: code review, git collaboration, reading a large codebase, shipping to real users. Find a Doc exists partly for this — it is an open-source project in Japan that has helped 225+ engineers learn, with several landing jobs through it.
- Job search with proof, not promises. A few real contributions and deployed projects beat a long list of completed courses.
The honest timeline
For most people doing this seriously alongside a teaching job: somewhere around a year, give or take, from "I know nothing" to "I am employable." Faster if you can go full-time, slower if life is full. The variance is almost entirely about consistency and getting real-team experience early.
If you want the step-by-step version — the exact workflow, what to learn in what order, and how to get onto a real project — start with The Guide. And come hang out in our Discord; the community is full of people a few steps ahead of you on the same path.