Alumni Story: Heather Goshorn, Software Engineer Associate at NetJets

When Heather decided to leave warehouse work behind, it wasn’t because she was looking for an easier path – she wanted to be challenged daily, doing something totally different. After seeing a friend’s Tech Elevator coursework and realizing she could follow along with the material, she knew software development could be the right next step.

A few months later, that hunch paid off. After graduating from our coding bootcamp in fall 2024, Heather landed a role as a Software Engineer Associate at NetJets, where she helps build and maintain internal applications used by private flight crews across the company.

What originally interested you in software development? 

I’d done a little coding in a college class and then tried to figure out some things on my own. What drew me to Tech Elevator was mainly that my friend was doing it. She showed me some of her homework, and I realized I could understand the material – and that it was a much more interesting field, for a variety of reasons, than continuing warehouse work.

Outside of the money, I really like daily challenges, so having something new to work on and doing different feature work is a lot better than the same routine of going in, stocking shelves, and going home.

Congrats on your role at NetJets! What can you share about your role as a Software Engineer Associate?

I’m part of a new team building an application to replace some old internal SaaS tools. I work in the crew planning space. The new application will let crew members bid for days off, take on additional work days, request PTO, and make other schedule changes outside of normal planning. My role on the team involves a lot of QA work. I create automation tests, and sometimes do full E2E testing manually on the UI.

When it comes to development, I focus more on the backend, using AWS Lambda and a handful of other tools, along with Terraform for resource creation. I also handle DevOps, where I build unified pipelines to deploy multiple resources to AWS across different environments like your sandbox, QA regression, and the actual production environment.

You mentioned that you worked in a warehouse/distribution. Are there skills from that line of work that you’ve been able to use as a software developer?

I was a district clerk and inventory manager, so I stocked shelves but also monitored inventory and placed orders when needed. That experience helped me analyze things from a business perspective and gave me a unique ability to understand what the business wants, including practical ways to reach those goals.

Software engineering involves a lot of data manipulation, and the inventory management work I did at the warehouse really helped with that, since I was already doing similar tasks like reviewing forecasts and determining when to order more of something.

What do you like about working as a professional software developer?

I like not going home with my body hurting all the time. There’s a big difference between using my body for labor and using my skills for labor. Plus, I enjoy the daily challenges, where every day brings something a little different.

On your team, do you or any others use AI tools regularly? 

In limited cases, the seniors and leads will use AI to generate a scaffold, then go in and adjust it to fix things. That’s usually for one-time processes like running a script, turning something off, or editing a config.

For the most part, though, since we can’t feed our codebase into something like Claude, we don’t have anything that works well at the team level. When my lead gives me an AI-generated scaffold, I usually find it would’ve been quicker to write it myself, and I lose out on some of the basics. Ever since I installed a linter, I’ve forgotten how to use semicolons, and when I let AI generate a scaffold, I tend to lose my syntax.

How did your post-bootcamp job search go?

I finished the bootcamp in mid-October 2024 and got hired at NetJets on January 17, 2025, but my offer had come through on Christmas Eve. So for about two months, I was job searching every day. I spent time on job boards and company websites, checking reviews to make sure they were reputable and not one of those data farms you sometimes see. I tracked everything in the Tech Elevator Kanban for job applications.

My big break came when something was shared in the Tech Elevator Slack channel for graduates. I applied to NetJets and went through three or four rounds of interviews with them. It was an intense time; I stayed consistent, applying to two or three jobs a day, five to seven days a week.

Do you have any advice for someone considering a coding bootcamp?

If you’re questioning it, that’s completely reasonable. The market’s not in a great place right now, especially with the rise of AI. But there’s always going to be a need for junior developers, because at the end of the day, senior developers don’t have the time to make sure Claude or Chat GPT or Gemini spit out something usable. There’s no better time to start than now.

Interested in following Heather’s path into tech?

Learn more about our full-time and part-time coding bootcamps here, and attend an upcoming live online info session to hear from our team in real time.