How I Became A Software Engineer Without A CS Degree

so how is it that i went from an assistant to a software engineer in less than a year without having to spend a dime on a boot camp or computer science degree well today you're gonna find out so for any of you familiar with this channel you may remember this little gem i didn't go to school for any type of technology at all getting this [Music] i thought that i saw my grandmother's body in the morgue in one of my previous videos don't become a software engineer like me i talk in length on my pursuit of getting a career in tech all the way going back to my senior year in college however so i didn't really go into detail on the last leg of my journey going from deciding to quit my job so suddenly to getting to a boot camp and finally getting that first position in tech today i want to take this time to further go into the details of that timeline specifically why i decided to quit why i decided to go to a boot camp and how exactly i pursued my career in tech all within the hopes of helping anybody who needs any advice or suggestions on what to do and what not to do when finally getting the courage and gumption to pursue a career in tech and if you decide that you like this video make sure you give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my youtube channel okay let's get started [Music] as some of you might know i did in 2015 graduate with a college degree flash forward a couple years later to 2017 i was working as an assistant at a property management company as well as coaching as a color guard instructor at a local high school now looking back i wasn't having the greatest time with my life just because i was transitioning from another job i had decided to finally start coaching with a friend i was gaining more friends i had just more perspective i was traveling more i was hanging out with my friends more but i wasn't really satisfied with what i was doing in my life i'll admit to you guys that i had left a previous bootcamp i had taken for coding before and was still having residual feelings about how i basically messed that up i had a really good opportunity to find another pursuit in my career and decided not to take it i was a little frustrated i just felt like i wanted to do something else and decided not to pursue tech at that time however in 2017 i realized that i still really liked code i really liked html i really liked css i really liked javascript i was still a little frustrated about what things that i could make or projects that i could make or things that i could actually do with a career in tech but it was still a career option and i decided i wanted to look further into it because i didn't have anything else to lose as much as i really loved helping people with my job as an assistant i really wasn't getting any more value out of what i was doing it was more customer service i was just getting paid a little bit more than i could have with any type of other job that was just helping run papers and do copying and different things so it just wasn't a career fit for me i was still looking over my projects and different things that i completed from the previous boot camp and decided that maybe i should try this again and look into it a little bit further and as i did more research about what exactly software engineers do what they make how they make it where they can travel the world and be remote and just basically have a lot more freedom and flexibility to do what they want to do and be innovative and what they're doing well the dots started to connect and i really wanted to get back into coding and potentially pursue a career in tech and that's where everything got a little crazy the moment i knew i decided i wanted to quit my job was when there was a sudden regime change there was a lot of kind of management rolling at the company there were different people quitting there were different people being fired there was a lot of just oversight on what people were doing at all times and i didn't really love the environment that i was working in i didn't love how i was being micromanaged to be honest when we were pursuing phone calls and running copies and getting things for customers and tenants at one point i had a manager who said that i could not leave my desk to even go use the bathroom without her say so and in that moment i said i have to find a way to get out of here that decision actually came at me rather fast at this point in time my new manager and i were at each other's throats there was a lot that was going between us we were not getting along very well and it just wasn't a good work environment for me [Music] if i kept doing that job i would be broke and i would have stayed broke so in the pursuit of figuring out what i wanted to do i decided to start more research should i go back to the previous boot camp that i liked but really wasn't in love with or should i try any other types of classes something online a bootcamp online a class online a course online or an in-person bootcamp that might have smaller classes and just more of an intimate learning environment that i needed conveniently as i was researching more places to find boot camps or online classes that would be good for me i happened to stumble on a facebook advertisement for a boot camp called savvy coders i decided what the hell i'm just going to apply for it anyway see what happens and if i have to pay money i'm just gonna have to pay it and we'll see what happens the great thing about savvy coders is that i was immediately met by elaine one of the co-founders of savvy coders we had a very awesome long conversation about how i wanted to pursue a career in tech to see where it lands me whatever happens i would just like to experience a little bit more intimacy in my learning environment and see where that goes for me she immediately accepted me into the program and helped me with the paperwork and i had a scholarship where i got to go to that course for free classes were going to be getting april of 2018 so i believe in january or february 2018 i had to figure out what i was going to do to make sure i preserved my self-help my mental health to get through while i was in this job or quit and find a new job i was absolutely furious about this and there wasn't much that i could do the environment was just not a great place to work and honestly the customer service in general the quality of the product of having people living in these houses wasn't exactly something that i was okay with selling so in those 30 days i had done my evaluations i had done the timelines i had done all the notes and i had saved up enough money for about three months and i quit and let's be honest here in no way am i meaning to say that any of you who are going through the same thing you should be rage quitting your job without a plan one of my biggest regrets about quitting that job is that i didn't decide to have a plan or didn't decide to get any support from anybody that i knew i didn't care i just really needed to get away from that job i was incredibly sick and tired of having to deal with this person breathing down my neck every night i would work late and then go to band practice all the way until 10 o'clock where i would come back around to the city back to my apartment and fall asleep where i would have worked maybe 15 hours that day it was incredibly stressful and i was ready for that change [Music] this specifically was a boot camp where i would go for five nights a week three hours a night for 10 weeks i decided to pursue this bootcamp because i really aligned with the curriculum they were talking about html css and javascript and how you were able to do things in git and github something that i was still kind of struggling with myself and even though the curriculum was specifically for front-end development i got a lot of exposure to data structures and algorithms how you can start pursuing and building things on the back end with javascript and particularly how i could do more with a back-end language like potentially python or java or c-sharp alex our instructor was a amazing he was a self-taught developer himself i really appreciated him breaking down all of these data structures all of these formulas all of these concepts he was teaching for javascript as well as shortcuts to do more being a lazy programmer i really loved collaborating with the students there it was so much fun having to see everybody so inspired about what they wanted to do i know that a lot of them pursued further on to other different types of jobs in tech and there was a lot of help when it came to career services after savvy coders like specifically we had a job fair where i demoed a bunch of projects to hr people as well as recruiters that wanted to help figure out where i could navigate or go into a position in tech so that was in april that i had started savvy coders and 12 weeks later it was around june i had finally graduated with my little certificate i was so happy about that yay me i knew i had to be disciplined i knew i had to make sure every day i was doing something that had related to code because if i didn't and i didn't get a job in a timely manner then what in the world was all of that rage quoting for so every morning i would just try and finish a project by myself if i had any questions or went through the savvy coders curriculum i would ask my instructor i would ask one of my fellow students or i would go through the udemy course that i took with andre negoe i was super intrigued first with andre negoe's zero to mastery javascript boot camp and i really loved the way he set up all of the foundations for html css javascript and going into a little bit of node going into es6 making sure that we understood what was going on for the back end with the service to the client which is the front end eventually i found another course that i loved a little bit better when it came to the javascript basics colt steel's web developer boot camp and that was another awesome resource that took me to the next level when it came to node when it came to more data structures with javascript as well as pursuing other backend languages and going into full stack development money was tight and i still had to figure out what i was going to do when it came to the gaps my learning gaps and what i needed to do for finding a job in tech so i just pressed on there wasn't really much else that i could do i was still looking at andre negoe's course i was still looking at cold steel's course and finally i had started looking through potentially free courses from udacity and just making sure that i was able to piece together what gaps that i did have in my knowledge especially around scrum teams agile methodologies unit testing that was something pretty big that i didn't really understand and automation too i didn't really know anything about that until i actually got my job and then there was the whole applications thing that was a full-time job as well i would sit there every day i would take half the day to study and then half the day to refine my resume to see who i could at least get my foot in the door with maybe get a phone call with and see who would be willing to teach me guys i had applied for so many jobs i would estimate around 250 i'd say that that was around the ballpark i had refined my resume so many different times for each of those jobs just to see what i could do honestly it really only resulted to maybe seven or eight maybe ten max phone calls when it came to interviews and only three in-person interviews that's crazy it wasn't necessarily my fault that people weren't exactly calling me back or ghosting it was probably because my resume wasn't detailed enough for them maybe people forgot about my resume or i just wasn't a specific fit for what their needs were one of the particular places i was lacking in focus was white boarding i did a lot of exercises on hacker rank just to see where i could figure out what i was missing when it came to my gaps in knowledge and how exactly i could go through step by step kind of talking about my code and go from there now i was still getting help when it comes to job searches from savvy coders as well as my old bootcamp launch code who has a recruiting program and a lot of their pursuits in finding me a job it was great i definitely got a lot of phone interviews majority of them from launch code but it still wasn't enough so i decided to partner up with another recruiter that i knew someone that was close to the organization for savvy coders and i wanted to pursue more when it came to applying for jobs from there that wasn't until maybe september where i actually got more interviews specifically like in person interviews my recruiter had recommended me to start looking for positions and quality assurance and testing and see where i could go to build my career from there and i decided what the hell i mean as long as it does programming then that's totally fine for me that's where i got the opportunity where i am right now at the company that i'm at so i was able to get an interview with them and i was able to understand the concepts of quality assurance testing and how to pursue different types of testing and collaborate with the developers and see how to break things and how to fix them if you guys didn't already know already from the previous video i was sitting in a room with seven managers that had needed a quality assurance engineer and it was an interesting two hour interview i was scared out of my mind it was a great conversation but goodness gracious like i felt like i was getting grilled that was the hardest interview i think that i've ever had in my life that was super scary after that two hour interview i just sat in my car and was crying because i was just thinking like man like it's almost been a year like this is ridiculous i i can't believe that i haven't found anything yet even like a basic job when it came to programming but at that time my recruiter had called me when i was going into my second interview at another company and said you got the job and this is how much you're gonna get paid for it and do you want it or not i was incredibly shocked like goodness gracious i thought i did horrible there and i had to take a day or two to think about it what my mentor told me after i had decided to tell her and think about it was that you're going to want to place a bigger company that is going to have the money and have the opportunities to mold you to figure out what exactly they want you to do when it comes to pursuing their career in their exact tech stack and hopefully that will open more doors to you for innovation and going into what exactly you want to pursue if you decide to get another job at another company so in the end i said yes so i'm not a quality assurance engineer anymore i am a fully fledged java developer and there is still a lot that i need to learn but because i decided to be a quality assurance engineer for about a year and a couple of months it gave me some great opportunities to figure out what more i could do when it comes to test automation when it comes to breaking and fixing code and basically pursuing a better and higher quality of code in general so some advice for you guys and some resources that i found were very helpful please please please make sure that you go find colt steel's web developer boot camp course on udemy it is literally only ten dollars when you get a free account it was such a good course i really was very grateful to get a better understanding on the basics of html css and javascript in node i was able to make not one but three full stack applications with that course and i was just very impressed with the way that he was able to break down the concepts and he was a little funny so that that made a little a little bit better i also started looking at eloquent javascript that is another free book that is out there in the interwebs you can go find a pdf or it is on a github page i know so googling eloquent javascript or you don't know js that is also another resource that i found very helpful in my studies elite code and hacker rank are one of the other resources i use to start looking at technical exercises and really how to better explain what i was doing when it came to technical interviews and some other advice that i have for you guys is if you decide that you need to quit your job to pursue a boot camp or really being a self-taught developer make sure you have a plan if you really need to get out of a situation that is a toxic work environment make sure that you have a plan maybe if you need to transition to another kind of silly job that may be a little boring but at least there isn't any drama then do it it really would have helped me if i just decided to hop to another position and just kind of stay there make money and also pursue this boot camp i probably would have been in a better place make sure that you're carving out as much time as possible in your day even though you're working even though you're taking care of your family find a way to just carve out some time and start coding because that's the only way that you're going to learn and my last bit of advice that honestly i wish that somebody would have told me was to be consistent because you're already doing a great job when it comes to figuring out what you want to do with your life when it comes to tech and it just takes a little bit more if you just go the distance go a little bit more just go a little bit farther you'll just be a little bit more smart you'll have a little bit more experience under your belt to get that job so you don't necessarily have to be an expert in everything when it comes to what programming languages that you decide to do or whatever you decide to pursue honestly if they're a good company they'll be able to let you know have you get into training figure out how you can get access to a mentor and help you grow in the company and honestly help you stay there and that's it that is my story on how i decided to fast track to get a career in tech if you liked this video make sure you give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos on tech career lifestyle and unsolicited advice my name is sydney and i'll see you next time

Channel: Sidney Buckner

Views: 7,607

Rating: 4.9201598 out of 5

Keywords: being a software engineer, how i became a developer, how i became a software developer without a degree, how to teach yourself programming, software developer, software developer no degree, software engineer, how to become a developer without a degree, women in tech, software engineering, how to become a software engineer, black engineers, teach yourself programming, how to become a software engineer without a computer science degree, self taught software engineer, sidney, buckner

Id: GUsgQ4TbTzI

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020