$37k to $125k+ Self-taught Software Engineer

hello everyone my name is TJ and I'm a self-taught software engineer and in this video I'll be sharing with you how I took my salary from thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars a year to over three times that by teaching myself how to code so make sure to subscribe does that be posting coding tutorials and a lot of other tips and resources that you can use to start teaching yourself how to code as well this video is broken into different sections so check the description below for different time stamps in case you want to skip ahead now a quick background on me I was born in Nigeria but I grew up in Dallas Texas I did my undergraduate at UT Austin where I got a bachelor's degree in nutritional science and after that I went to Arizona State University and I got a graduate business degree now all of those degrees are pretty much useless outside of getting me into a lot of student loan debt and it was the stress and pressure of being broke that ultimately drove me to start teaching myself how to code before I started teaching myself how to code I was working as a as a business analyst for a small tech company in Austin where I was making thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars a year so each paycheck was about twelve twelve hundred dollars every two weeks but my student loan payments was about a thousand dollars a month so after paying my student loans I was pretty much just living off with one paycheck the main turning point happened for me when I got a promotion so I got promoted from business analyst to senior business analyst but my salary didn't get a promotion so I went back and forth with the manager asking for a raise and the manager ultimately gave me a raise and my salary went from thirty seven thousand five hundred to thirty nine thousand nine hundred and ninety eight dollars a year and something about them leaving out the edge for two dollars to make my salary forty thousand dollars a year even something about that just kinda really rubbed me the wrong way and I knew right then and there that that this salary was not gonna help me to pay off my student loans quick enough or afford me the type of life that I wanted to live and I decided that day that I was gonna start teaching myself how to code as soon as I made that choice I called my friend that was a software engineer and I asked her if I want to learn to build apps what is the least amount of things that I need to know so she immediately started to tell me about the difference between mobile apps and web apps front end versus back in etc but she also ultimately pointed me towards Ruby and Ruby on Rails as a beginner friendly language and framework to start with and she also told me to check out the course curriculum for different online coding boot camps to see what they were teaching their students so I did just that I found like general assembly and deaf boot camp at the time which doesn't exist anymore but I requested the course curriculum for all of these coding boot camps and I used that to create my own coding curriculum using using a bunch of free online interactive tutorials to help teach me each topic now my dream job at the time was to be a software developer at IBM and and I actually found and found a job post for that role and I printed out that job post name and I wrote on it December 2016 that was the deadline that I gave myself to make a career switch from being a business analyst to being a software developer so now when it came to study I worked I worked a full-time job from 9:00 to 5:00 and I would come home from work you know I would eat and watch like an hour or two of like suits or mr. robot and after that I would study all night until around 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. and then on the weekends I spent a couple hours volunteering or going or going to a tech event then I will be home just study all day and that was my schedule for a few months until I started to think that my full-time job was getting in the way and I really wanted to to just try to really go all in and study and learn how to code full time my apartment lease was ending in October and I really wanted to use the last few months in my apartment to study coding time so I quit my job in July after I saved up enough money to pay the rest of my rent and to also have a few left over just to kind of even buy gas for for at least a couple months now at the time two of my sisters lived in Austin and my girlfriend had just moved to Austin as well so I knew that I would have a place to live by the time I quit my job in July I was already building basic apps on my own but I kind of felt stuck and I wasn't really sure what to do next so I talked to a friend about it and this friend convinced me to attend a coding bootcamp so I took out a loan and I went to deaf boot camp now the point of a coding boot camp is to help absolute beginners go from knowing nothing to being able to build basic web apps on their own but I was already doing that before I got to the boot camp so I spent most of my time at the coding bootcamp just working on personal projects for my portfolio especially since I had teachers to talk to that can now quickly help me with things I finished their boot camp in September and I and I immediately searched from learning to code and working on projects to studying for interviews and job searching full-time I spent the first half of my day applying to jobs in the second half studying for interviews and I tweeted that like my nine-to-five important note the whole time that I was teaching myself how to code I was actually tweeting about my progress on Twitter and this engineering manager has started following me and was impressed by my progress and this is how I got my first job offer from a random stranger on Twitter that just so happened to be following me talking about my progress now this not this offer was a verbal offer for a software developer apprenticeship that would pay seventy-five thousand dollars a year but this offer would not be confirmed until December and even if it was confirmed the job wouldn't start on through in January now mind you this is September and I'm broken unemployed and bouncing between my sister and my girlfriend's place so needless to say I kept job searching now my first official offer letter came November 2016 when I got offered a role to work as a test automation developer for a major insurance company in Scottsdale Arizona the salary for this role was fifty nine thousand dollars a year but outside of me having to move to Arizona and this job also wouldn't start until January but at the time I was starting to get stressed and kind of discouraged with the whole job search so I immediately accepted the first official offer letter that I got now keep in mind my goal was to make a career switch by December 2016 so for me to have accepted a job offer now in November 2016 I felt kind of happy you know I felt a little bit relieved that I had somewhat achieved my goal well not somewhat but but I achieved my goal and I just kind of took a couple days to breathe easier now shortly after accepting my full-time job offer to start in January I also got another offer for a one-month apprenticeship with a new delivery startup in Silicon Valley now mind you even though I had a full time job offer to start in January I was still broken unemployed until I started working so having this offer in December was perfect so I didn't end up working at either of those two companies because what happened was the week before I was gonna fly out to Silicon Valley I I have booked my plane ticket for Saturday and the Wednesday before before that I just casually reached out to to a local entrepreneur or startup founder in Austin just a kind of network with them and see what they were working on and just and just overall meet them before I moved to Silicon Valley in them with Arizona and 20 minutes into that meeting this guy offered me a full-time software engineering role to start in December for seventy-five thousand dollars year I don't know about you but I knew that I would be a fool to not accept that offer because one I got to stay in Ossining with my sisters and my girlfriend and two in Texas you don't pay state income tax like you do in in Arizona and three seventy-five thousand dollars was twice what I was making before working as a business analyst so I immediately accepted the offer and I started working for that startup and I started was a cybersecurity startup in Austin that actually just got acquired a few months ago so now that I had a full-time job working as a software engineer things were things were a bit easier because the hardest part about this whole journey is getting that first job but once you get that first job recruiters are gonna be messaging you like almost every day right so what happened with me in terms of how I got to six figures was I ended up changing jobs every 11 months I knew that the best way for me to significantly increase my income was to change jobs getting a raise wasn't really it because the average raises between three three to five percent but I really wanted to make six figures so what happened was I left my first job after eleven months and I got another job so I went from making 75,000 to around $90,000 and then I left that job after 11 months where I went from making ninety thousand to six figures and after that I started to kind of take on part-time work helping to mentor coding boot camp students and and the income from that took my salary or took my total compensation to over 120 thousand dollars a year and that's how I ended up going from thirty seven thousand dollars a year to six figures in less than three years so thank you so much for listening to my story if you want to if you want to hear more about my experience especially my experience working for a start-up that was in techstars and then working for a start-up that ended up in shark which which is actually kind of crazy um subscribe and keep up because I'll be posting those videos to kind of talk about the difference between working for a text our startup and working for a shark tank startup and just some of the different challenges that you face and I will also be posting coding tutorials to help to teach you guys how to start teaching yourself how to code as well so subscribe and see you later

Channel: ToluVsTj

Views: 546,387

Rating: 4.9637618 out of 5

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Id: NyCyknm_n8M

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020