How I Became A Software Engineer Without Computer Science Degree | Amazing Story

oh what's going on guys welcome to my channel today i'm going to interview ben a backhand engineer and basically i just want to share with you guys ben's story because you know he has no computer science degree or any any degree in computing and yet he managed to become a software developer so this to me just shows that you know anyone can do it and you just have to believe in you right so if you pull in your mind that you want to become an engineer then you can do it right there's nothing to stop you so nowadays you know a lot of people think that you need to have a degree in computer science but in reality you do not need to have a computer science degree so ben is a very good example because you know i remember the day that i started you know when he joined the company um and just to see like his progress right his progress is he's become a long way and he's very very clever on what he does and i really admire him that's why i want to share with you ben's story so let me actually go and um and grab him and let's just go and have a chat oh and if you haven't subscribed to my channel please go ahead and subscribe to my channel because that way i can keep on you know recording videos like this um that will help you to become an engineer right so i know there are a lot of you guys from all around the world messaging me asking questions on on on new different topics and aspects of being an engineer and you know the reason why i'm doing this is to help you to become an engineer really that's that's the main goal so yeah let me let me go ahead and grab ben what have you broke hey nelson what's going on are you ready [Music] today there we go cool man so uh thanks for doing this uh again um thanks nelson thanks for having me over so guys please make sure to subscribe to my channel uh so basically i just wanted to give you guys um some inspiration really on on how we became a software engineer right because it's a very good example um it has no degree whatsoever and i don't have a degree he hasn't got a degree but still he managed to become a software engineer i think it's really impressive unlike myself what do you create you are i've got computer science degree oh i did okay but yeah still we we have the same job uh doing the same thing um you know and yeah man i just want to share with with my fans and and the world you know that it's possible nowadays to become a software engineer yeah yeah man so just uh tell us um you know what you do yeah sure um sorry it's uh ben pouring so i work here as a software engineer at starlight and been over here for a year and five months i think a little bit slightly more than that on a day-to-day basis we come in every morning like most places we have a stand-up we talk about the things that we just we've done yesterday and talk about any challenges we've had we've got a really good team that are working in um here at starling there's i think 10 of us or slightly more but everyone's so supportive and experienced which is really helpful especially for someone who is still learning i mean there's there's always room to learn but someone like me was a junior and then you just get on with you you know you're not julian you know you know i develop it i think it's good to be humble in terms of i don't let me just tell you that okay oh thank you i appreciate that i mean i i i think i always like to see myself as a junior developer yeah because uh that makes you be more humble and always open to new ideas and you never reject people's opinions because there's so much to learn there's always room to learn exactly yeah but yeah so i look at code every day and i write code and i debug things but i think something that probably doesn't get mentioned is the communication that we have with all these other departments yeah any organization that we work in is that you don't just sit there and put your headphones on and code all day you actually go and talk to people um and make sure that you unders get a good understanding of what the issues they have what problems they have is so yeah that's what i do wow wow are you full stack i am a full stack developer i mean you expected to be a full stack developer yes darling because i mean you you've moved away to uh over to infrared a lot of infrastructure stuff but uh you know you expected to come not only just do java development javascript front-end back-end deploying services using whatever um technology that we have currently obviously using aws and terraform uh but yeah so full stack to that full stack well then manual then java javascript uh so i primarily called in java what do you prefer in javelin so i think they both have their own advantages i the way my mind works i like java the way it's structured javascript is quite nice to use uh too if you want to get up and go i mean our front end is meaning javascript yeah redox and it works fine you know and we some we i write code in javascript um for the front-end stuff but it's nice because you can pick up a ticket or a project and you can complete the whole end-to-end um yourself exactly and you get such a great amount of things you have to wait for you know front-end developers to build this and then you know exactly so yeah it's amazing i mean it won't look pretty necessarily but you could do you can do cool man uh so yeah man so um you know what's really interesting to me is that you have no computer science degree yeah uh what degree do you have so i i don't actually have a degree um so i uh left uh college when i was 16 17 decided that i wanted to start working um i didn't want to go to university for the sake of going to university um obviously there was always objections from my family and they were worried i was never going to get a proper job but i didn't i didn't let that hold me back i think um it's there were times where i felt that perhaps i'm being judged or i'm being excluded because i don't have a degree and that's fine you know you come across those challenges but it also highlights that maybe those places are not the right place for you because they still have a very backward mindset yeah a different way of thinking about how to assess quality and talent but yeah no no degree or so wow well i i mean i still remember like when i when i drop out of college like i had no idea on what i wanted to do and you know going to college and then going to university was a struggle for me yeah but for you like seeing that you had no no degree and yet you still managed to pick you know all of these computer science you know subject um not subject but like um topics yeah yeah understanding understanding of it's amazing man so yeah i mean it was it wasn't easy at all um i think when um i guess the how i got into development was quite by chance um i wanted to uh i wasn't fulfilled i wasn't happy in what i was doing yeah so i was working financial services nothing complicated so there was just very you know sales or compliance and i wanted to be challenged i wanted to do something different yeah yeah um and some somebody gave me a whole like bunch of books that they'd studied and this was a c-sharp developer guy so i put them in cupboard but some time later i um was just bored i wanted to get into development i wanted to find out what it was about and i looked at some of these books and i was like no idea what any of this means yeah so i went online and tried to find free uh i think it was a microsoft website that did these free courses on c sharp so i started writing you know hello world apps yeah yeah to me hello world quite complicated but i started off there and i would and that was it like i mean i just um i was like i can do this and i started buying books i'm following making little terminal applications yeah yeah you know the ones that you say you you listens to the input and then you you you have a few if statements which you then say if it's this do this and i would uh i would wake up in the morning i think at five o'clock five thirty five in the morning before going to work every day five in the morning yeah just to give myself an like an hour out of studying uh or teaching myself yeah and then i would take my laptop in and then it got to a point where i was like actually i mean you really enjoy this i can i really enjoyed the problem-solving aspect of it so i quite like to get into this and uh yeah and that was it um well done and we've we've got we've got someone that wants to be on the video uh yeah you can come in come and say hi to my fans guys don't forget to like subscribe and click the bell icon for amigos code and share the videos thank you anything else you'd like no let's say you can i mean yeah like you're saying five o'clock every day uh so i see yeah i used to wake up at five in the morning and um i i i don't know just in uh sparked an interest for me and it was um it sort of almost gave me a motivation to look forward to like sort of getting up at bed and then going to work and finding that time in lunchtime sitting in this cubicle yeah writing these programs i remember when i was uh mucking around with these um c-sharp uh command line programs i built this little game and i went over to one of my friends and uh and this was like three years ago maybe uh so i said oh yeah have a look at this game i built i was quite excited i know i built this thing that actually responded to some commands and you know in this black screen like nobody like you just hiking horses it's not fun but for me it was quite intriguing and he said what is this crap and i was like oh come on yeah but uh but yeah like you know i persisted and um and eventually i ended up actually getting the job as a software engineer obviously there's more to it but how so so so you were studying uh programming but then what decided that you you wanted to become a software engineer right so i wasn't studying programming per se but it was um i was trying to find out more about it because yeah i mean i think there's a lot of people probably out there who will um like relate to this you go on google and you say i i like i think this is probably that everybody at some point will type this when they don't know anything about programming yeah what is the best programming language to learn or what is that most uh earned programming programming language like that's the thing so that and that just confuses you because like i didn't even know what was the difference between java or javascript or c-sharp yeah i didn't know any of this i didn't know what object-oriented programming was you know what functional programming was and and you know this there's such a like it's such a huge field and um you know not having people around you to answer those questions or somebody and and and you know what programmers are like you know if you find one or two they have such strong opinions so i carried down down the path of like teaching myself to a point where i was confident that this is something that i really wanted to do and i decided to create my job to teach myself and i try to go online speak to recruiters and find junior positions because you know that's what you do like you try to get an entry-level job but the requirements for entry-level jobs were either required like no actually most of them 90 of them which i looked at were at the time were required a degree yeah and experience and experience and then they also paid you peanuts like they paid you enough money to perhaps travel in which is yeah quite unfair i think i have strong views on that um and and then so i carried this on for a good few months um but it was it was tough man i i i obviously i i i couldn't do it by myself wow well so obviously you've you've done a boot camp um so what what was the the reason behind you uh you know doing the actual boot camp did you think that it was something that would help you to to get the job or because you didn't have a degree you know that's why you you did it right yeah so i um so i remember i quit my job i think it was april or may 2017 yeah um with the notion to um try to teach myself and i quickly realized that actually i can't do this by myself and i'd i'd booked this trip to go away uh sailing for a week because i was really getting i really enjoyed sailing so i was trying to teach like learn how to sail and i went on this trip for one week and on on this trip i met this lady uh who uh who you know we got to know each other we were talking about what i was doing and and i said i'm trying to teach myself to code and luckily he had she said that her daughter had been just doing the same so she'd had a degree in physics from cambridge or somewhere i think and she didn't know what she wanted to do and she decided to change jobs and she went through to this boot camp which i'd actually funnily enough had heard of but because of the amount of money they were charging i was hesitant to actually commit myself because i quit my job by this point and i was like that's a lot of money i'm going to pay for like three four months yeah of something that's almost like how much you pay for it years or probably yeah and but after the trip i spoke to this lady's daughter who'd done this boot camp yeah and that convinced me that it's probably the right thing to do and i i mean i can tell you what obviously we discussed and what was the ins like the point yeah um i guess for me like the biggest worry was am i going to get a job at the end of this and and i think from what the impression that i got from the conversation that i have with this girl is that it's not going to be easy it's going to be hard i mean nothing nothing is easier and and you know the jobs are not guaranteed it's not guaranteed and you know i guess i was lucky that i i by that point i'd already been trying to teach myself for a good few months i already knew that i had the motivation and the drive and the consistency to to do it and you know i wanted i really wanted it badly and i wasn't going to just throw my money away and a lot of people do that and i feel bad for them because they fall into this trap of you know software engineering could come across as a i guess a maybe a a a trendy thing to do now right you see all these fancy videos and you know you have such a fancy life working with twitter or facebook or whatever it's not it's it's hard it's not it's challenging and i think if you do if you don't have the drive or the characteristics then you will lose uh focus and you lose interest in the job very quickly so i knew it was going to be a challenge and i knew that i'd already tried to teach myself uh but the good point was that you know by going through this bootcamp i was almost giving myself a platform to um show myself off to other potential employers where they would have potentially dismissed me if i'd go into them directly exactly yeah but funny enough i actually didn't end up getting the job through the bootcamp anymore i found both my jobs uh previous one to styling and starting directly myself wow it's just my sheer motivation and like like you know hunger too this is what i i tell to my subscribers like you know you just have to have the passion and the drive right so there's no point for you learning how to code if you if you don't have projects to show right or you know if you if you want to want to become a software engineer but then you don't you're kind of just just doing it just for the sake of money right because you think like you know programmers you know they get a lot of money and and that's it right yeah so if if that's that's what you want that's not going to take you anywhere right no you just have to have the passion the drive and the show that you really wanted and i think that will will take you a long way um so yeah i think with that like without those things um you you'll give up very easily because it's a type of job that could get you you could feel very frustrated and very easily yeah yeah because you know you you know what i mean when i say you're stuck in something you could be stuck on something for you know for a couple of days because like you're going through this complicated code and you're looking at each line and and it's it's not it's not like it's a pretty thing to look at it's like just a black screen and some some scribbles if to people with just just nothing right and you're looking through all these lines of code and you know some people with more experience could quickly go through it but let's say you're working your way up and the more experience you get yeah those initial few steps are really difficult and i think if you can't if you don't have the passion or the drive to see yourself through those few few months or uh in the first year yeah yeah then you'll you'll probably give up very easily and and i know a lot of people have gone to boot camps and spend a lot of money and they've quit actually have no two people quit through the boot camp because they just don't have the motivation uh but yeah no pain no gain man yeah that's that's that's that's that's the that's the deal man uh so yeah man so do you enjoy what we do what do you do after after these years so um it's not been years it's been only a couple of years well i mean two years ago i think i'd like to say like um so i started so when i left the bootcamp yeah um i was hoping that they would support me in finding the job which they did but um i guess um you know everybody out of the 29 or 26 people everybody's fighting for the same jobs and i wasn't lucky enough to get through to any of those jobs or perhaps i was very picky about who i wanted to work for yeah yeah so i ended up working for a consultancy actually they approached me on linkedin and uh they knew i was looking for a job i was a junior so they took me on it was really cool i spent six seven months moving around a lot of big companies in the city of uh in london uh which gave me a quick exposure to a lot of different tech uh stacks i worked for telecommunications company i worked on a uh a cryptocurrency project short for a short period of time so for me it was really amazing because it allowed me to make a decision as to which direction i wanted to go in yeah yeah and i didn't want to be staying consultancy so then i decided to i wanted to focus uh on a particular stack so like java specifically java and and be able to learn that in a way all learn the fundamentals of programming you know how you go about solving problems and see like almost build build a project and see it grow because i felt that that would give me more experience than actually moving around and i obviously started applying for jobs because i reached a point where i knew that i didn't want to stay there anymore and i wanted to focus on a particular product and i'd known of styling so i applied to starlink i i cancelled two or three of my interviews with other consultancies because i've made the decision that that point is it's either going to be stalling or nothing or i'm going to go i'm going to if i don't get through it then i'll go apply somewhere i'll try to find something else yeah so i worked tirelessly trying to get detectives through um i had a telephone interview first uh i was so adamant like that i wanted this job that i said can i do it face to face first so i when i met the guy one of the engineers here in the cafe instead of having a phone interview we had a 20 minutes half an hour chat really yeah and uh he gave me the tech test and then i did a tech test and i was i kept doing pull requests on the tech test uh pull request detectors i didn't have time to finish it but this is what i found out this is my so i i put everything in it i mean i was well or i think i did like i spent like a whole week just preparing for this and then when it came to the final interview i had uh interviewing um uh third interview it was a two-hour interview by two of the senior developers they were really kind to me but you know it was an hour and a half i talked a lot and was so um you know i put so much effort into this and and then they sort of went out and then uh in came one of the hr girls and uh one of uh i think cto i was like okay what is going on here and yeah they talked to me a bit more and i started talking about salaries and then they offered me a job then and then i was like right there and then uh in the third interview no wait yeah third interview so i was i was so emotional because i was i was i think i even broke up broke out in tears because like you know you're working so hard i've been working since 2017 to get to this point and stalling meant so much to me in terms of what they gave me the opportunity the opportunities i could learn the opportunity to learn and you know being in this environment and so yeah wow i didn't know that the whole story went yeah it's quite it's quite emotional period and yeah and i've been here since ever since you know wow wow so yes i do enjoy it and i and you know well i can tell you i um so yeah i think um let's just wrap it up uh what what advice would you give to someone um that's learning programming or or more to junior developers that want to to find a job what would you tell them so i think maybe it can be broken down into the category of you know you people like yourself who've been to university and done a computer science yes i think you or you know that already right you know that that's that's what you enjoy and you're lucky to actually have stuff i i went to computer science but i had no idea what i was doing okay so it was like really tough really tough yeah see part of part of me in these people who know or knew what they wanted to do yeah at like at that at that age yeah yeah i mean i i sort of knew what i'm to do but i didn't know that um this was going to be the thing for me um so i would say if you're already doing your computer science degree and you you're in the course what they teach you at university uh is useful but it's may not apply to what you do in in in the real world so if you're thinking of doing your masters maybe think about it what is the reason behind that what could you gain from doing that yeah um because uh there's so much you learn so much more by uh being in the working environment and the thing that you know that the things that i wish i uh knew like the algorithm stuff but that doesn't stop me from learning them myself so i know they spend a lot of time on that in universities but you know i guess maybe i'm not the best person to give advice and maybe you can have more of an input but you can learn all of that i mean we live in a day and age where everything you want is available to you so if you want to learn especially on youtube yeah thanks to people like you so if you want to learn there's a you know a ton of information out there so and i worked in with like when i was a consultancy on i was sitting this guy so there's this huge insurance company in the city uh i was working on uh uh as part of the consultancy and then and there was this 19 20 year old that sat next to me and this guy was hired to do their penetration testing for their systems this 19 year old doing penetration testing for a billion pound uh a year like a company so you can you can imagine like you know this guy had a passion and from you know from a very young age he knew what to do he didn't need to go to university the things that he knew the uh the the lecturers at university want to know so uh i'd say for those people like if you know what you're doing then you know that's amazing and i think you just gotta be look at the job specs uh look online look at the software developers like yourself you talk about coding practices or uh give you an idea of what it's like to work in a uh development environment because that that will slightly prepare you for what you could potentially expect in real life uh as a software engineer and for people who have not taken the conventional route like myself i'd say uh don't do it because you see someone doing it and looks exciting don't do it because on the surface it looks cool you get a macbook or you walk around your slippers or like you know don't do it with flip flops like yeah i don't have flip-flops on today but do it because uh you've done the hard bit of trying to understand it yourself i think that would be a good test i mean for me that was a test yeah yeah because i was so worried investing all that money and going to a bootcamp that for me the tech that i had already done that self-evaluation by trying to teach myself because it's not easy trying to teach yourself it's such a mindful just getting your system set up turn it to code to get it to return yeah you know that takes thanks and i'm just just being able to figure that out by reading stack overflow or google it on google that already shows you that you have those basic understandings or uh intuition to become a developer because that's what it is right apart from like you know we don't want to judge each other but apart from the different ways we learn it's just the fact that you you're you will continue down the path trying to solve a problem where you don't give up yeah exactly exactly yeah and i think that's probably like the best advice i can give to people like who are in my position um and just try to teach yourself and see what you feel like see if you've got the patience if you do and you can see yourself doing it every day then then then just um you know follow the rest of his advice and then maybe i'll talk more about the bootcamp experience yeah we should definitely definitely let's just uh talk about whether it's worth it or not um but yeah man so guys thank you uh ashley thank you first thanks for doing this opportunity guys you know this channel is more about giving you guys you know inspiration and and and give you like a real insight of of what is like and how you can become a software engineer right so when i started myself i didn't have someone like myself obviously that could actually you know explain me and you know guide me throughout the way right so and that's what i want to give to you and and for the whole of this channel is to help you guys and give you real life examples that will help you to become a software engineer um thanks for watching please make sure to subscribe to my channel to get more videos like this and should i say anything else yeah thanks for listening sorry if i ramble done but um yeah good luck true story man thanks a lot you

Channel: Amigoscode

Views: 407,933

Keywords: being a software engineer, computer programmer, how i became a developer, how to learn code, how to teach yourself programming, learning to code, life of a sofware engineer, self-taught programmer, self-taught software developer, software developer, software developer no degree, software development, software engineer, software engineer career, teach yourself programming, learn how to coding during quarantine, learn how to code in 2020, learn to code from home

Id: WAtcwmRYXDc

Length: 29min 38sec (1778 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020