In the above post I talk about the struggles and excitement I was feeling when I decided to put it all on the line and join a full time immersive boot-camp. It has been a whirlwind since I last wrote about my excitement and fears in making a huge life change. While I was working on buckling down my finances, and trying to see how the numbers would match up, i.e. how was I going to survive through it, on my wife's teacher salary? Something totally unexpected happened. Since I had a bit of development experience, freelancing part time and building front end websites at my Sysadmin job, my portfolio site looks decent enough built in React. I was getting some callbacks from recruiters. I let them know about my upcoming boot-camp start date, and that I was looking to increase my skills at this point.
I never expected to get an offer from any of the three companies I was talking to, and more or less going through the interviews for the personal growth and experience. I ended up getting two competing offers, and one offer wanted to rush me through the hiring process, to get me on-boarded before the third company (Amazon) got to interview me. It turned out that they saw Amazon as a direct competitor and were happy to bring me on before they got the chance. It's so funny how things like that can work for you. I felt pretty bad to have to cancel my boot camp well before the start date, I would have learned a lot and been able to make some great connections, and had fun, but honestly I doubt I would have been able to keep the lights on. So it all turned around for the best. I feel lucky to be where I am, and learning while doing is an amazing deep way to improve technically.
I just wanted to jot this down, and speak to the many paths to the goal of getting in to a development position. Just keeping going and getting better at interviewing, and enjoying that process, is the one thing that helped get to the right mindset to actually get hired. Enjoy learning about different companies, ask a lot of questions in the interviews, dig in, enjoy it, it's fun. I hope to write about some of the interesting things I have been learning.
From the other side,
John
Top comments (10)
Congratulations and good luck John.
You'll learn on the job, that's a great way to learn!
Congrats! That's so, so awesome!
Thanks so much, It's hard to believe. Now the work of delivering at said job is in full swing. I got some good feedback from a System Architect that they were impressed with how I dove in to some newer DevOps tech that is outside of my comfort zone. So Yay! I hope I can give a little back now.
Yay! That's super super cool
Congrats, what a great feeling!
Thanks! It has been a wild ride!
This is great! Congratulations!
Congratulations John. Good things happen to good people, not long ago you sent me a very useful study link, and asked to take a look at my code if I needed help.
Absolutely, I'm happy to have helped. I totaly forgot about that. Glad you found value in it.
change that work_status on your dev.to profile 😊
congrats!