Why I left engineering for marketing (and why I am still an engineer)

I was twenty-one and I had two browser tabs open.

One was a half-finished assignment in VS Code. A function that was throwing the same error for the third hour in a row. The other was a YouTube video of a founder breaking down how he got his first thousand users on Twitter. I had been told to focus on the first tab my entire life. But I kept tabbing back to the second one.

That was the moment, if I had to pick one. The slow realization that I was way more interested in the second problem than the first.

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I had done everything right up to that point. Computer Science at G H Raisoni College. Decent CGPA. The skills to land a developer job after graduation, like everyone else in my batch. The path was so well-lit it almost felt rude to step off of it.

So I did not, at first. I started my career in development. I wrote code. I shipped features. I tried to want it the way my friends seemed to want it.

It did not take long to figure out something uncomfortable: I could code, but I did not love coding. Not the way the good developers I knew loved it. They could disappear into a problem for ten hours and come out happy. I would disappear for ten hours and come out wondering what I was actually building toward. The work was fine. It was just not the work I wanted to spend a decade getting better at.

But I had also noticed something else, and this is the part that mattered more. Every founder I admired — the ones building things I actually used, the ones whose threads I read at midnight — was not winning because of their code. The code was the easy part. They were winning because they had figured out how to get people to care. Distribution was the actual product problem. And nobody in my CS degree had taught me a single thing about it.

So I started looking for a way out. Or more accurately, a way *in*.

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The opening came at PluginHive. A small startup, the kind of place where if you raise your hand for something, you usually get it. I raised my hand for marketing. Not because I had any credentials for it — I did not — but because it was small enough that I could pivot without having to pretend to be someone I was not. I could just say "I want to try this" and try it.

That was where I figured out two things at once.

The first was that I actually liked marketing. The puzzle of it. Why one cold email gets a reply and another, almost identical, does not. Why one landing page converts at 4% and another at 0.5%. There is a satisfying rigor to it once you stop treating it like art and start treating it like a system.

The second was the bigger realization. **My engineering brain was not a handicap in marketing. It was the unfair advantage.**

Most marketers I met had to outsource the technical part. They had a strategy, but they needed someone else to wire up the tools. They knew what they wanted to test, but they could not actually build the test. I could. I could read the docs of any open-source tool and figure out how to bend it to my use case. I could write a quick Python script to clean a dataset that would have taken someone else a week in Excel. I could look at a campaign workflow and immediately see where to automate, where to keep human, and where to instrument so I could actually learn from the results.

That is when I started thinking of myself differently. Not as an engineer who had switched lanes. As an engineer who had finally found a problem worth solving.

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Unacademy was where I got to test the theory at scale.

I joined as Growth and Content Strategy Operations Associate on their GATE YouTube channel — one of the most competitive education niches in the country. From the outside it looks like a content job. It is not. It is a discoverability problem disguised as a creative one.

I treated the channel the way I would have treated a slow piece of software. I ran competitor analysis on every channel in the space like I was running diffs across competing implementations. I rebuilt the SEO and content strategy around what was actually working, not what felt good. I instrumented the funnel so I could see which videos turned viewers into students who actually paid.

The channel grew 30% in four months. It cracked the top 10 list of YouTube channels in India for the GATE category. High-intent leads went up 34%, which was the number that mattered, because that was the number that justified the channel existing in the first place.

But the numbers were not the lesson. The lesson was that everything I had learned debugging code applied here. Inputs and outputs. Feedback loops. Hypotheses you test instead of opinions you defend. The marketers around me were doing the same job by intuition. I was doing it by instrumentation. Both could work. Mine was more repeatable.

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Creator Chart was where I stopped being a specialist and became something else.

The title was Founder's Office Associate. The reality was being a one-person GTM department for three months. There was no division of labor because there was no one else. I was running SEO with Ubersuggest in the morning, building out AEO and GEO experiments at noon to figure out how brands show up inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Claude — work most marketing teams had not even started thinking about yet — and running webinars at night. I did the LinkedIn outreach. I identified the ICP. I closed a ₹1.5L client. I built creator-led content strategy across Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, Medium, and Substack.

This is the period that turned me into a full-stack marketer. Not because I learned every channel. But because I had no choice but to build every layer underneath them. When the manual work got too painful, I automated it. When a tool did not do what I needed, I dug into the docs and made it do what I needed. When a workflow was breaking down, I rebuilt it from scratch instead of patching it.

Most marketers, when they hit a technical wall, stop. They write a Notion doc that says "engineering should build this." I never had that option. I was the engineering. So I built it.

That is when it clicked for real. **The engineer inside me was not a side note. It was the entire reason I could move this fast.** The technical fluency to understand any new product in an hour. The comfort with open-source tools that most marketers find intimidating. The instinct to automate anything I had to do twice. The ability to read an API doc and immediately see how to plug it into a campaign. None of that came from marketing. All of it came from the years before, when I was the kid debugging functions at 2 AM.

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Kasparro is where I am now, leading GTM Sales, Content, and Community. The role is genuinely end-to-end. On a given Tuesday I might be writing a sales deck in the morning, building out a long-term workflow process for the team in the afternoon, and reading cold email replies at night. I run 5,000+ leads a month through outbound — Apollo to Clay to Instantly to HeyReach — and I obsess over reply rates the way I used to obsess over test coverage. I have scaled two AI persona accounts on X from zero to 400+ followers and 600K+ impressions each in thirty days. I have grown Reddit accounts past 18K karma. I have built relationships with CMOs at D2C brands that started as cold emails.

The work I am most proud of, though, is not any single campaign. It is the long-term processes I have put in place — the workflows, the templates, the reporting loops — that have streamlined how the team operates and cut execution time across the board. The kind of work that does not show up on a dashboard but compounds quietly underneath everything else.

That is the engineer in me, still doing what engineers do. Looking at a system that runs on manual effort and rebuilding it so it runs on infrastructure.

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Here is what I have figured out after three years of this.

AI has made building easy. Anyone can spin up a product now. The differentiator has moved entirely to distribution — to getting real things in front of real people who have real problems worth solving. And the people who will win at distribution in the next decade are not going to be the pure marketers or the pure engineers. They are going to be the people who can do both. Who can sit in a strategy meeting in the morning and write the automation that executes it in the afternoon.

I did not plan to be that person. I just kept following the thing I was interested in until I ended up here.

People ask me sometimes if I regret leaving engineering. I tell them the same thing every time. I did not leave it. I just stopped writing code that ships products and started writing code that ships growth. The job title changed. The brain did not.