Christine Weng on why she took time to explore and reflect before pivoting from accounting to tech

Christine Weng began her career in accounting — tax accounting to be exact. But during her first year in a full-time accounting role she realized she was more interested in the technology side of things.

“Ever since I started actually working, I realized I enjoyed automations, problem solving, and process development,” Christine says.

She took the time to explore her options by working with a group at her company that did tech consulting, but was still focused on accounting.

“Exploring isn’t a bad thing,” Christine says. “If you try something and you don’t like it then, at least you know.”

Christine’s interests stem from pain points in her previous job, she says. The tools she was working with didn’t have certain features and there weren't the resources to fix that.

She spent a few years thinking, reflecting, and preparing to pivot into technology.

“I felt like I hit a plateau in tech consulting so that’s why I went back to school,” Christine says. “There were a lot of unknowns in tech that I wanted to learn via a proper education.”

Christine completed a master’s degree in computer science. Upon graduation, she applied for a job at Elastic® and has been on the security threat hunting team for a little over a year now.

The team contributes to security solutions for customers, she says. They work to expand the customer’s experience to help them do their job better by giving them better data and visualizations.

“Surprisingly, I consider what I’m doing to be very similar to my pre-engineering days,” Christine says. “I problem-solve on a daily basis. I talk to product managers to figure out what the requirements are, talk to UX/UI to discuss design, and then I code, test, and put it all together.”

“Something I’m working on right now is improving user experience when triaging an alert. It adds to the customer’s experience and tells them, ‘Here’s what happened and here are the places to look to investigate it.”

Christine hopes to continue to grow in her technologist role and continue to grow and expand on what interests her, she says. 

As someone who believes in taking her time and reflecting on things, Christine encourages others to try different things. 

“Go for it,” she says.“Tech can be many things, even within software engineering. Five years ago, I wanted to be a data scientist and work with big data. Through my journey, I realized I enjoyed software engineering and it led me to Elastic!”

“If technology is what someone identifies as their passion, then I encourage them to take the leap."

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