Ahmedabad, July 29, 2026: For nearly eight years, Ahmedabad’s Anand Thakkar full-heartedly delved into one career path, Accounting and Taxation. Working in his family’s practice while pursuing the qualification, he lived and breathed taxation, auditing, GST, TDS, and compliance. Software engineering wasn’t even on his radar. Then the pandemic hit. As his family’s business struggled, Anand watched his cousin, who worked in IT, sail through the disruption untouched. That contrast stayed with him. Curious about what made tech so resilient, he picked up C and C++ through online courses. However, he soon realised that self-taught coding wasn’t going to be enough to get a break in the industry. So, in June 2025, he enrolled at Scaler to build his Computer Science fundamentals, drawn to its focus on real skill-building.
Starting from zero in a technical sense, Anand worked his way through programming basics, databases, and APIs, eventually landing his first tech role as a Mobile Application Developer Trainee in 2022, before moving into Backend Development. But hands-on experience only got him so far. Without strong CS fundamentals, cracking interviews at top companies felt out of reach.
Balancing a full-time job with live classes before work, assignments after hours, and daily revision was challenging. However, the experience transformed Anand’s approach to engineering, from simply writing code to thinking in terms of complexity, optimisation, scalability, and architecture. Reflecting on his journey, Anand says, “Coming from a non-tech background, I knew I had to rebuild my foundations from scratch. That’s where Scaler came in. It gave me the structure, mentorship, and confidence to think like an engineer rather than just learn to code. The journey wasn’t easy, but it proved that with consistent effort, transitioning from a non-tech career to tech is definitely possible.” At 33, starting over meant embracing the mindset of a fresher all over again, and he leaned into it fully. A brief break due to family commitments also taught him a harder lesson: momentum, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.
His turning point came at an HCLTech Hackathon, where the concepts he had learned clicked into place in real time. It wasn’t long before he cleared HCLTech’s interview process and landed the role of Senior Technical Lead, with a salary hike of over 100% from where he started. For Anand, the real lesson isn’t about talent or timing. It’s consistency. From eight years of number-crunching in accounting and taxation, to architecting backend systems, his story is proof that reinvention has no age limit, as long as you keep showing up.
